Background
Agnes Repplier was born on April 1, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second of four children and second daughter of John George Repplier and Agnes (Mathias) Repplier.
Her genial but somewhat diffident father, raised in eastern Pennsylvania by French and German parents, earned a comfortable living as a coal retailer in a mining and processing partnership with his brothers. Her mother, the second wife of John Repplier, came from Westminster, Maryland, of German parentage and was the dominant parental force in Repplier's life. The private events of Repplier's childhood are much obscured by her lifelong reluctance to discuss herself. Such as are known reveal early talents and eccentricities.
Education
She was nearly ten before learning to read, but from that time on she soon exhausted a rich but unconventional family library. Her formal schooling, beginning in 1867, lasted for less than four years, during which time she was admitted to and dismissed from Eden Hall, a school directed by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, and a private school in Philadelphia conducted by Agnes Irwin.
Although her departure in both instances was occasioned by what her mentors called excessive willfulness, Repplier paid loving tribute to both experiences in two books and maintained close ties with the Sisters. Agnes Irwin, who later became the first dean of Radcliffe College, became a close friend and sponsor of various of Repplier's professional activities.
She received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania (1902), Yale (1925), Columbia (1927), Marquette (1929), and Princeton (1935).
Career
Returning to her home in 1871, with no prospects of further education, Repplier read widely and occasionally submitted articles to local newspapers.
From this life of leisurely indirection, she was suddenly called to help support her family when John Repplier lost his money through unwise investments. Largely at her mother's urging, the fifteen-year-old girl began to write essays and short fiction for children's magazines and the Sunday newspapers. Thus was launched a career that was to extend through the next eighty years, a career marked by a constantly enlarging readership and a reputation for a constancy of quality. Her essays and fiction first reached a national audience in 1881 through publication in the Catholic World; she later became a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly.
As her success increased, she began to live the life of a woman of letters: lecturing, traveling, doing research, and writing at her residence in Philadelphia. On the early advice of her friend Isaac Hecker, Paulist editor of the Catholic World, she gave up writing fiction in the 1880's. Thereafter, except for biographies of two friends and three figures from early American Catholic history, she concentrated her literary energies on the "familiar essay. " This genre won her national literary prominence for over half a century. The subjects of her essays ranged from the pleasures of tea, and her favorite cats, to the strange careers of public executioners.
On such diverse subjects, she trained her wit and erudition, not to prosecute a thesis but to enlarge the reader's consciousness of the richness, variety, and continuity of human experience. To the religious enthusiast - her constant enemy - Repplier's prose is idle and self-indulgent. Indeed, some of her fellow Roman Catholics accused her of deliberately hiding her religion by refusing the role of polemicist.
She often spoke of her affection for England and the past, and her essays might be said to mirror the qualities of British neoclassical prose. Their pattern is quite simple: a proposition is announced, and a wealth of historical and literary references is gathered around the subject and framed by a tone of quiet detachment. The form carries large risks, particularly the temptation to facile verbal play.
However, by her exquisite selection of detail, by a reverence for verbal exactitude, and by a fine balance of thought and feeling, Repplier achieved a high level of craftsmanship.
Her earliest school comrade was the writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell, wife of Philadelphia artist Joseph Pennell. Others were Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness, English essayist Andrew Lang, and - unlikeliest of all - Walt Whitman. Although the income from her numerous books was never very large she supported her mother, sister, and a partially invalided brother, and left an estate of $100, 000.
By 1940, when she published her final essay, Repplier had collected a garland of public honors.
At the age of ninety-five Repplier died of heart failure in Philadelphia and was buried in the family vault at the Church of St. John the Evangelist.
Religion
She was a very devout Catholic, as well as a constant defender of conservative values.
Politics
Outside her books, always the primary interest of her life, she maintained a conservative's disdain for the waves of progressivism that swept the country and was sharply critical of programs of legislation and education designed to remedy social inequities. Rarely, however, did she enter into debate over such issues, the two most prominent exceptions being a public exchange with Jane Addams over child labor laws and her vigorous support of the entry of the United States into World War I. In this respect, her account of Lord Byron is aptly descriptive of her own temperament: "the settled order of things appealed with force to his eminently practical nature". The triumph of advocacy journalism, however, rather than her unpopular views or a loss of literary power, best accounts for her gradual loss of popularity.
Views
Quotations:
"It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. "
"America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed. "
"It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do. "
"It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh. "
"People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything. "
Personality
As a child, Repplier was tortured by her mother's constant disparagement of her physical features, a habit that made her almost morbidly defensive about her appearance. This fact perhaps explains the absence of close masculine relationships in her life as well as the restraint and ironic tone of her essays and conversation. But she had friends, numerous, fond, and often famous.
Thin, angular, conspicuous only for her habit of chain-smoking cigarettes and a marvelous gift for platform repartee, Repplier moved quietly through her ninety-five years, although the cultural attitudes of the twentieth century appalled and sometimes frightened her.
She was a heavy smoker.
Quotes from others about the person
Edward Wagenknecht described her, in 1946, as "our dean of essayists".
