Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman

Leigh Eric Schmidt's Heaven's Bride, The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, published by Basic Books in 2010, is a scholarly biography of the late nineteenth century American writer prosecuted and ultimately driven to suicide under the Comstock obscenity laws for her writing on sexuality within marriage, framed also as a mystic who believed she communicated with a spirit husband. Schmidt is a historian of American religion with a substantial body of work on unconventional and marginalized religious figures. Its strength is that scholarly, archivally grounded treatment of a figure most earlier writing either dismissed or sensationalized, taking her religious claims seriously as part of her worldview rather than as incidental color. Its limit is that reconstructing a marginalized, persecuted figure's inner life relies heavily on her own surviving writing, so a claim about Craddock's private beliefs beyond what she herself documented should be read as Schmidt's careful inference rather than independently corroborated fact.