Agnes Repplier: The Secular Writer as Saint

In the heart of Center City Philadelphia there is a small graveyard alongside the church of Saint John the Evangelist. A careful reading of the headstones will reveal the tomb of the Repplier family. How many Repplier family members are buried in this vault is a mystery because on the stone there are no inscribed names. Even peering through the graveyard’s wrought iron fence for a closer look will not reveal the name, Agnes Repplier. In many ways, this graveyard ‘invisibility’ symbolizes what the famous writer’s life was like when she was known as “the quiet lady writer who lives west of the Schuylkill.” While people the world over may have loved her books, the appreciation she received for her work, at least in Philadelphia, was at best lukewarm.

Well into her writing career, Repplier’s Philadelphia roots took some in the literary world by surprise. After one Boston lecture before an assembly of High Tea types, it was declared unanimously that the speaker couldn’t possibly be from Philadelphia, unless she was “a Bryn Mawr woman.”¹ Repplier took such reactions in stride, and always wanted to be known as a Philadelphian. Her 1950 Philadelphia Inquirer obituary even states that, “While Miss Repplier was widely known throughout the English speaking world for her essays on literature, social problems and the fads and foibles of people, and while she had traveled extensively in this country and had studied in Europe, she remained primarily throughout her life a Philadelphian.”

Her life and career spanned many important periods in the nation’s history: the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the closing of the Victorian Age, her meetings with Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton and Henry James, as well as living through two World Wars, the Korean War and witnessing the rise of the Soviet Union. Whatever the epochal event or calamity, the “Dean of American essayists” was there to write about it and her changing country. She also managed to do so by balancing a worldly intellectual life while remaining a devout Catholic, a feat which must have been a spiritual tightrope at times given the strict ‘disposition’ of pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

If Repplier’s religion caused her to experience any stress within literary circles, she kept it hidden. Throughout her life, the essayist whom The New York Times would call “The Jane Austen of the essay,” not only kept the faith but managed to win the praise of an acerbic wit like Dorothy Parker. By contrast, it would be difficult to imagine a devout Catholic writer doing a similar thing today, given the polarizing effect that social issues have on what it means to be devout.

In her essays on life, literature, and American politics, Repplier never betrays her cosmopolitan tastes and learning. Even when discussing ‘Catholic issues,’ such as in her essay “Goodness and Gaiety,” she takes swipes at humorless sanctity, especially as it relates Catholic hagiographical tendencies in the lives of the saints. Repplier decried these “embodiments of inaccessible virtues, as remote from us and from our neighbors as if they lived on another planet.” She solidified her view with a reference to Cardinal Newman “who first entered a protest against ‘minced saints,’ [and] against the pious and popular custom of chopping up human records into lessons for the devout.”²

About hagiographers in general, the compulsive heavy smoker who would nevertheless live to be 95 wrote, “In their desire to be edifying, they cease to be convincing.”³ In her book, Mère Marie of the Ursulines, Repplier examines the life of Mère Marie, a widowed woman of thirty who entered the Urusline convent in Tours, France, and who was then recruited to do missionary work in New France, or Quebec, in 1678. “It is inevitable,” Repplier wrote, “that commentators on Mère Marie’s life should compare her to that great mystic and great executrix, Saint Theresa … one of the high lights of hagiography. Her field was wider than Mère Marie’s, her task harder, her mind keener, her personality more magnetic. She has stamped herself upon the history of her...