Elisabeth Leseur: Selected Writings (review)

This volume introduces Anglophone readers to the life and writings of Elisabeth Leseur (1866-1914), an upper-class, well educated French woman whose diary was warmly received in Catholic circles when it was first published in French in 1917, three years after her death from breast cancer. It was translated into English in 1919, and later into several other languages. The translation presented here, however, is a new one by Janet Ruffing, who uses more modern language. It is accompanied by material previously unavailable in English, primarily Elisabeth's correspondence during her last years of suffering with her friend and spiritual advisor, Sister Marie Goby. The texts translated are preceded by an extensive and very useful introduction by Ruffing.

One reason for the initial success of Leseur's diary was the extraordinary story behind its publication. Several years after marrying a militant atheist, Elisabeth rediscovered an ardent belief in the Catholicism of her youth. She entered into a pact with God, to live her life as a witness to the power of faith and in prayer for the salvation of her beloved husband, Félix. Her suffering became dedicated to him, gaining a purpose and justification. While she originally planned to destroy the journal, which records her dialogue with God and her reactions to the pleasures and pains of her daily life, she ultimately decided to leave it for Félix to read after her death. When he did so, he was not only converted, but became a Dominican priest and spent the rest of his life working for his wife's beatification and canonization (a process that is still on-going). The evidence submitted included his conversion, her exemplary Christian life of heroic yet modest suffering, and the positive effects of her writings (in the form of thousands of letters) on many others.

I first came across this journal when working on a study of posthumously published diaries by French women of the nineteenth century. My initial reading of it (as a non-believer) was somewhat hostile, since the diary seemed to me to have served as a weapon of posthumous blackmail. However, Ruffing's sympathetic and knowledgeable presentation of the context in which the diary and the letters were produced has given this reader, at least, a much more positive view of the author. Ruffing undertook considerable research into Leseur's writings, including locating some of them, and her translation is both meticulous and readable. She also provides an excellent explanation of the social, political, and religious milieu in which the Leseurs lived. Elisabeth's ideas on the communion of saints (including transferable credits toward a place in heaven) appear in a less mercenary light, when understood in more spiritual terms.

For her time and place, she was in fact very enlightened in wishing to combine faith and democracy, participation in social life and an inner mysticism. Her love of learning and desire for more education for women mark her as a rebel against a powerful patriarchal ideology as well as its defender. As the author of the preface points out, her diary is of particular interest because it portrays an attempt to live as a religious or a saint, while maintaining a "normal" family life and social engagements. To her sorrow, Elisabeth had no children, but in her writings she left a bequest to others who suffer physical pain and emotional isolation, one of courage and hope that is to be appreciated whether or not one shares her faith. This book therefore occupies an important place in representing a certain type of feminine lay spirituality in the Paulist Press's series "The Classics of Western Spirituality."