Stephen Neill (1900–1984) is a well-known figure: He was a prolific writer, and for historians of Christianity in India, his sixty-five books and articles on that subject are a treasure trove; his founding of the Diocesan Printing Press in Tirunelveli in 1942 remains today one of his greatest contributions to the Indian church; and he was a famed priest, pastor, and bishop in the years immediately prior to independence. Yet no one prior to Doughrity has written an academic biography of Neill, or mined the relevant archives to reconstruct the personal history of such a complex figure. Thus, Bishop Stephen Neill is of interest not only as the first full-length treatment of Neill's life, but also because it provides several fascinating cross-cutting contexts: twentieth-century British missionary church history, especially in South India; the rise of Indian nationalism and its relation to the church; and the on-the-ground setting of competing missionary institutions, personalities, and ideologies.

Neill, as evidenced in Doughrity's material, was an extraordinarily gifted man with an astute, brilliant mind. He learned Tamil fluently, loved Indian village life, and championed the vernacular, sponsoring a new Tamil Bible translation in 1939 and calling for Tinnevelly to be properly renamed Tirunelveli. However, he was also competitive, yearned for praise, and behaved in an authoritarian, imperialist manner with those under his supervision. One of his greatest shortcomings was his seeming inability to admit wrongdoing—and to collude in what some have called the “conspiracy of silence” (p. 238) surrounding uncomfortable events and aspects of his personal life. Indeed, in Neill's autobiography, God's Apprentice, completed and edited posthumously by E. M. Jackson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), Neill either excuses or completely passes over events of his life that were difficult or controversial.

It is these details that Doughrity uncovers. He finds that Neill suffered, from the time of his English school days, from depression, insomnia, and fits of temper; once in India, he had periodic difficulty in dealing with missionary colleagues (in 1925, Neill was expelled from the missionary compound in Dohnavur of the famed Amy Carmichael, for reasons still not completely understood); and in 1945, he was asked to resign from the Tirunelveli bishopric for acts of sadism.

Indeed, the unveiling and telling of Neill's story is the strength of Doughrity's book. He consulted numerous archives in England and India, attempted to see private papers (both Carmichael's and Neill's are, interestingly, under restriction and hence unavailable), and conducted interviews in India and Cambridge with people who had known Neill. One particularly important interview in 2003 was conducted with the oldest surviving clergyman in the Tirunelveli diocese whom Neill had ordained in 1944; it is his comments that aid Doughrity in piecing together the story of what haunted Neill's private and public life.

In spite of the detailed undergirding research work and the gripping story embedded in Bishop Stephen Neill, the book is disappointing in two respects. First, it is stylistically sloppy. There are numerous places where facts, quotations, and even prose are repeated, and the manuscript could have used a leisurely edit. More foundationally, Doughrity's interpretive lenses appear simplistic. He utilizes what he calls the “conflict thesis” to understand the twists and turns in Neill's life, but this is not theorized to any degree, and there are no titles in the bibliography that deal with psychological conflict. Moreover, while Doughrity gingerly admits that Neill may have had repressed homosexual tendencies, he is reluctant to “go beyond the evidence” (p. 45) and hence misses opportunities to bring to bear on his subject the literature on homoeroticism and sadism. All the evidence that Doughrity amasses adds up to a picture that begs for more psychological interpretation than he gives us. Even the fascinating parallels between Carmichael and Neill—both were strict disciplinarians who caned subordinates for sinning, acted as near dictators in their administrative lives, and never married—are not explored. One thinks in this regard of Jeffrey Kripal's work, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which, by empathetically investigating the relationship between spirituality and sexuality, illuminates and humanizes it.

It is possible that Doughrity's timid interpretive stance is attributable to kindness or caution, given the sensitivities of his interviewees, his audience, and the Indian church. This is, of course, understandable. In any case, his book provides us with an intriguing wealth of information about the life of a complexly talented and tortured man, and for this reason, anyone who is interested in the history of Indian Christianity ought to read it.