Emma Curtis Hopkins

Probably the most famous obscurity in the history of self-help literature, Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849-1925) is known as "the teacher of teachers" and was responsible for the training of many of the stellar figures in the New Thought movement.

A quiet, reclusive wopman, Hopkins had for a time been Mary Baker Eddy's right-hand woman. Eddy banished her, however, when Hopkins made it clear that she would not become a mindless devotee. Never one to brook opposition, Mrs. Eddy became furious when she learned that Hopkins was devising some of her own ideas, and so caused the division which would help shape a whole new movement (New Thought) and probably, ulitimately, guaranteed the eventual obscurity and decline of Christian Science.

While she always propagated the general ideas of Christian Science, Emma Curtis Hopkins was much more committed to ideas of personal choice and individual free will, and lacked Eddy's famously dogmatic personality. Travelling from city to city, Hopkins would set up shop in a genteel hotel and set about teaching lessons in 'Christian Healing' to select groups of students. In this quiet way she lived out her life, earning a living from teaching her lessons and spending much of her time alone and in prayer.

Painfully shy, Hopkins (who had left her husband years ago in order to follow Mary Baker Eddy) spent most of her time her room, occasionally releasing a book. These books were extraordinarily dense and difficult to read (inspired, most probably, by the style of her great mentor), but their subject matter continues to influence the content and ideas of self-help, though most authors are completely unaware of it. Though gentle and retiring, she must have been possessed of a great charisma, because she taught and inspired people like Charles & Myrtle Fillmore, Nona Brooks and, right at the end of her life, Ernest Holmes.

Her own books are really exercises in theology, and barely fit the mould of self-help at all. They explore biblical stories and the sayings of Jesus in-depth, in a manner obviously inspired by Eddy. Because of the radical nature of her views and the popular manner of their propagation, she is yet to be recognised as a theologian, though I would suggest she is, perhaps one of the greatest and most influential biblical scholars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her continued obscurity is testament to the shameful gap in knowledge about New Thought and its importance on the behalf of most historians and scholars of religion. This obscurity was, however, addressed brilliantly by Gail M. Harley in her scholarly 2002 biography of "The Forgotten Founder of New Thought."

Hopkins was as well a committed 'womanist', a proto-feminist whose inspiration and ideas helped shape the New Thought movement into the female-dominated domain it was and is.