SOURCE: Dodds, Elisabeth D. “To the Breaking Point and Back” and “Rumblings.” In Marriage to a Difficult Man: The “Uncommon Union” of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, pp. 95-106; 107-113. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971.

In the following essays, Dodds discusses the episode of spiritual and emotional crisis in 1742 that changed Edwards's life, and she comments on Edwards's relationship with her husband.

To see in the “eternal feminine's” ideal of passivity and self-containment the seeds of self-paralysis and self-alienation is the great task of the modern era, resembling that task already recognized to establish, through love, the authentic self of the infant.

—Dan Sullivan

We wish we could erase the whole month of January, 1742. But because this episode in the life of Sarah Edwards was so peculiar, so unlike the character she showed in all the rest of her years, it is inescapable.

Here we don't like her at all. The...