Max Muller's book Râmakrishna: His Life and Sayings (1898) is one of the earliest works by a Western scholar on the life of Ramakrishna and, according to Walter Neevel, is a relatively independent source of biography. 

  

 [more on Muller on SRK needed] 

 Christopher Isherwood's influential 1929 book Ramakrishna and his Disciples introduced Ramakrishna to a Western audience from the perspective of a Ramakrishna Mission devotee. In a late interview, Isherwood said of Ramakrishna: "He was completely without any hang-ups, talking about sex-roles, because his thoughts completely transcended physical  love-making. He even saw the mating of two dogs on the street as an expression of the eternal male-female principle in the universe.""Christopher Isherwood: An Interview" Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Christopher Isherwood Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 22, No. 3, Christopher Isherwood Issue (Oct., 1976), pp. 253-263 Published by: Hofstra University 

 Romain Rolland described Ramakrishna's mystical realization an "oceanic feeling." In his 1929 book The Life of Ramakrishna, Romain Rolland argued that Ramakrishna's experiences were not pathological. 

 [More on Rolland on SRK needed] 

 Discussing Sudhir Kakar's 1991 essay, "The Analyst and the Mystic," Gerald Larson wrote, "...there would be little doubt that from a psychoanalytic point of view Ramakrishna could be diagnosed as a secondary transsexual."  

 In 1995, religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal wrote Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, a psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna. The book argued that "Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences...were in actual fact profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic."Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, p. 2 John Stratton Hawley agreed with Kripal: "Ramakrishna felt strong attractions for young men — "pure pots" of love, he called them — and that he associated these moods in a complex, persistent way with his mystical experience of Kali."Hawley 1998 In his review of Kali's Child, Gerald James Larson disagreed: "That erotic symbolism, including to some extent homoerotic symblism, is clearly present in some, or even many, of the saint's unusual reilgious experiences, in no way establishes a causal relation between the two." 

 Sumit Sarkar found "...traces in the Kathamrita of a learned literate knowledge/ 
 unlearned oral wisdom binary" and noted that all of our information about Ramakrishna, a rustic near-illiterate Brahmin, comes from his late nineteenth century urban bhadralok devotees, whose texts simultaneously illuminate and transform.Sumit Sarkar, "Post-modernism and the Writing of History" Studies in History 1999; 15; 293