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 there 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’s “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.

Could the lackluster acknowledgement that Repplier experienced in her native city also have something to do with the fact that there is no historic marker on the sidewalk in front of 920 Clinton Street, her most prominent address when she lived in the city? 

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.” 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.”

Saint John the Evangelist church was Repplier’s parish church for most of her life except for a brief interlude when she lived in West Philadelphia near 63rd Street. St. John’s was so important to her that she never made a move within the city without first taking into account whether she was within walking distance from the church. 

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 (including sharing a toothbrush mug of whiskey with poet Walt Whitman) 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 to Catholic hagiologist tendencies in the lives of the saints. 

About hagiologists 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.”

Repplier was an independent, unruly eleven-year-old student who began smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes in earnest while a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart (Eden Hall) in Philadelphia’s Torresdale section. Various mischievous behaviors led to her expulsion. She was later expelled from the Agnes Irwin School for her refusal to read a required book. In a tantrum best described as bratty, she threw the Irwin assignment on the floor. Years later, seeming to echo Edith Piaf’s famous line, “I have no regrets,” she would sum up those years in Our Convent Days (1905) by writing that her only real accomplishment at school was learning to smoke, thanks to one of the girls’ brothers who would smuggle cigarettes in for her. 

Repplier wanted to learn, but she wanted to learn on her own terms. Her obituary notes that “she took an active delight in reciting long ballads to her schoolmates,” and that “subsequently she attended a private school, but to a great extent she was self-educated.” 

The goody-two-shoes environment of Eden Hall, especially after morning Mass, especially annoyed the future writer who would grow up to be called “a shy Catholic version of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” 

“At that Spartan meal,” she recalls in Our Convent Days, “Even had we been able or willing to employ the hated medium [French], there was practically no one to talk to. By a triumph of monastic discipline, we were placed at table, and at church, next to girls whom we had nothing to say;-good girls, with medals around their necks, and blue or green ribbons over their shoulders, who served as insulating mediums, as non-conductors, separating us from cheerful currents of speech….”

By the time she was forty-eight years old, she had honed her rebel’s instinct into a finely woven fabric of “wit with more than a modicum of wisdom, with a simplicity of style and sincerity of treatment.” Even before she wrote Mere Marie of the Ursulines, her great Catholic epic on the settlement of New France, something about her future must have been discernible to Pope Leo XIII when Repplier, on a visit to Rome, knelt at his feet during Holy Week in 1903. Whether Pope Leo was prescient or knew who she was is hard to say, but something led him to reach out and take her hand in his own and hold it for ten minutes. Repplier described the moment this way: “I knelt at his feet for fully ten minutes, and he held my hand all the time, save when he laid his own hands on my head to bless me.” 

The writer experienced her own prescient feelings when on a visit to Constantinople with her niece Emma. Repplier found the Mosque of Saint Sofia “surpassingly beautiful, even in its degradation,” and then predicted “that the church will one day be restored to Christian hands forever,” because “over the Apse rests the figure of Our Lord, concealed yet dimly visible, a sign and a token that the hour of reparation will come.” 

Born in 1855, the writer’s rebellious streak may have had familial roots. Her mother, for instance, was a committed southerner with a loyalty to the Confederacy, while her father was a staunch Unionist. Mr. Repplier was unhappy with his wife’s aiding the Confederate cause, especially when she would send regular boxes of food and wine to southern prisoners at nearby Fort Delaware. As a girl in the company of her father, young Repplier saw John Wilkes Booth perform at The Walnut Street Theater, and she was also old enough to remember when General Lee surrendered to Union forces on April 15, 1865. On that date the Repplier family joined thousands of Philadelphians in street celebrations but after the mayhem, which included the setting of bonfires and the ringing of church bells, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Repplier found herself with her family standing at 21st and Chestnut Street as the body of the former president made its way through the center of town. 

It was during this funeral procession that a jubilant young female voice rose up in defiance of the tears and sorrowful music. George Stewart Stokes, Repplier’s biographer, describes that, “The onlookers turned in horror to see a young girl, enchanted by the spectacle, jumping up and down, clapping her hands in ecstatic glee. Mr. Repplier was furious. It was one of the maids from his household making the disgraceful demonstration.” Afraid that the crowd would react with violence, Mr. Repplier quickly ushered the young maid out of sight, so disaster was avoided. 

After her expulsion from school, Repplier found domestic life at home “stupid and monotonous.” A less driven child, perhaps, would have disappeared into the woodwork, but Agnes had the self-discipline to read voraciously, perfecting her French and Latin, reading and rereading Horace. Over time she would decide to try her hand at becoming a writer by submitting stories, articles and poems to various Philadelphia newspapers. 

 In the coming years she would achieve some success when she published two short stories and a poem in the Catholic World. 

By this time she was living apart from her family. Each day she would travel into town from her apartment at 4015 Locust Street in order to work in the libraries there. Although she had every opportunity to do research at the University of Pennsylvania Library, she felt uncomfortable in that setting (she had a benighted view of West Philadelphia in general) and preferred the more familiar stacks at the Library Company, especially at the Ridgeway Branch on South Broad Street, although she found the building to be a misbegotten place, “dark, dismal, depressing, inconvenient…a haunting horror.” 

The Catholic World, where many of Repplier’s early essays appeared, was founded by Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, a Catholic convert who had once lived among the New England Transcendentalists and who had been close friends with both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Hecker, who had made a serious attempt to convert Thoreau to Catholicism, was a man of stellar talents: mystic, writer and theologian. As the founder of the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle (the Paulist Order) in 1865, and The Catholic World in 1872, Father Hecker agreed to meet the twenty-nine year old Repplier for the first time in 1884 during her first trip to New York City. Repplier’s New York visit, ostensibly, was to visit the offices of the magazine in pursuit of the publication of her first story there, “A Story of Nuremberg.” During her meeting with Father Hecker the priest took her aside and advised her to forget about writing fiction and stick to the essay form.

By 1885, the grammar school dropout was well on her way to becoming an established writer. She was appearing in almost every issue of the Catholic World although her wish was to publish in The Atlantic Monthly, a goal she attained in 1886 with the publication of her essay, Children, Past and Present, about the pros and cons of disciplining children. 

Her first book, Books and Men, appeared in 1888 but only after the publisher made it clear to her that publication of the book would only happen if she subsidized it herself. Repplier was duly warned that she would lose a lot of money if she went ahead with the project. In the end, she did not lose money and the publisher admitted his mistake. Books and Men would be the only one of her twenty books that she was forced to subsidize. 

Although she would call several apartments home, her real Philadelphia home would be the first and second floor apartment at 920 Clinton Street where she went to live with her brother and sister. Tree-lined Clinton Street would later become associated with the name Agnes Repplier. 

Here she would sit at her writer’s desk by 9 a.m., since she did not find the evening conducive for work. Her parish church, Saint John’s, was nearby. Founded in 1830 by Bishop Francis P. Kenrick, Saint John’s was the city’s pro-cathedral before the construction of Saints Peter and Paul on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Repplier’s social life at this point consisted in speaking at many of the city’s small literary and conversation clubs. Philadelphia’s Camac Street, just several blocks from Saint John’s, was often referred to as “The Little Street of Clubs,” with its fine array of two-story 19th-century structures that housed some of the most artistic and Bohemian clubs in the city. Often referred to as Egg Head Row, on this one block radius between Walnut Street and Locust, one can find the Sketch Club, the nation’s oldest artists club; the Plastic Club, the nation’s oldest arts club for women (but made accessible to men in 1991), and the literary Franklin Inn Club, founded in 1902. 

Another club, the Contemporary Club, had luncheons which were devoted to the exchange of ideas and to the hot topics of the day. Guest speakers included Margaret Singer and poet Walt Whitman. Repplier, in fact, often spoke there, except when she was asked to participate in a debate on Shakespeare and had to decline, saying, “I do not assign to myself the task of imparting what I don’t know to the world.” 

Contemporary Club members valued Repplier for her impromptu comments when the talks were turned over to the audience. Referred to as “Agnes Reply-er” during these occasions, she would often debate with journalist Talcott (“Talk-talk”) Williams of The Philadelphia Press. 

In 1886, when she was able to get Walt Whitman to address the Contemporary Club, the poet showed up looking fairly disheveled in his country farmer clothes, and her fears naturally turned to the kind of speech he would deliver. These fears were alleviated when the poet did not disappoint but in fact spoke “beautifully well within bounds, and with a charming grave and manner.” Some time later, she would introduce novelist Henry James to Contemporary Club members, but the impeccably groomed author of “The Ambassadors,” “Washington Square,” and “Portrait of a Lady,” proved to be a disappointment although Repplier’s hearty introduction was the high point of the day. 

Perhaps Repplier’s greatest literary Philadelphia friend was writer Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a Franklin Inn member who had developed a famous system for treating nervous men. Mitchell’s idea of a rest cure was to send the nervous men to the west where they could rope cattle, hunt game, rough ride horse, bathe nude in icy creeks and engage in various forms of male bonding. In his 1871 book, Wear and Tear, Mitchell encouraged nervous men to go west in order to reinforce their masculinity and to test their willpower. “Under great nervous stress,” Michell wrote, “The strong man becomes like the average woman.” He saw city life as an emasculating and dangerous feminizing force. 

Repplier’s other Catholic biographies include Pere Marquette, and Junipera Serra. Mere Marie of the Ursulines, the story of the settlement of Quebec, by the Ursulines and the Jesuits, is ruthless in its descriptions of the hardships the missionaries and colonists had to endure. Repplier uses the language of the day when writing about the Indian “Five Nations,” and when quoting from the forty-one volume Jesuit Relations, a record that Repplier praises for its “fidelity to facts, and in the closeness of the tie which bound the missionary to his country.” The Jesuit and the trader, she wrote, “were the only white men who had any real inkling of the Indian’s psychology; and, of the two, the priest was the more tolerant observer.” 

In the politically charged atmosphere of today’s universities, the material in Jesuit Relations has sometimes taken a beating, with revisionist scholars insisting that the volumes are more fiction than fact. Mere Marie details a lot of burning at the stake, general slaughter of young and old, women, men and even infants. Mere Marie’s letters during her long tenure in the new colony provided Repplier with an historical account of day to day life in Quebec. In both the Relations and in Repplier’s biographies, Indians are routinely called “savages,” with the Iroquois being considered the most savage of all. 

By 1900, Philadelphia’s own “Jane Austen” had already won the admiration and respect of the biggest names in literature, among them Edith Wharton, poet Walt Whitman, and novelist Henry James. Among her friends she counted artist Cecilia Beaux, novelist Owen Wister and poet Amy Lowell. 

“There isn’t a writer in the country who hasn’t been trying to achieve the perfection of style of the distinguished Miss Repplier,” Edith Wharton said to her after their 1906 meeting in Lenox, Massachusetts. 

When Repplier visited the poet Walt Whitman in his Camden home sometime after the poet spoke at the Contemporary Club, “she found him a most astounding old man, though very simple, kind, and hospitable.” 

The fact that Whitman was boarding in Camden when they met, was for her a most depressing reality. She felt that being a boarder was one of the most depressing ways anybody could live, and added that the reason why the great poet had such difficulty in getting along in life could be traced to his living in a city like Camden.

“His little room was littered with old newspapers, so that one lighted match carelessly discarded would send him into another world,” Repplier wrote. 

She believed that while Whitman wrote a few great lines worth remembering, most of it was forgettable. “Whitman,” she said, “always had the courage to be just what he wanted to be, that he never allowed anything to interfere with his life, and this she found an admirable quality. But she felt him to be an incurable poseur. He loved his indecency, she insisted, clinging to it with almost embarrassing ardor.” 

It is unfortunate that during her lifetime, Repplier turned down artist Thomas Eakins when he approached her about painting her portrait. She was afraid of Eakins’s emphasis on realism. In explaining her refusal, she said that as a tall thin woman, she’d probably have an easier time with Eakins than she would if she had been born “dumpy.” 

Repplier’s refusal to have her portrait painted probably contributed to her feeling that she was under-appreciated in her hometown. Having her portrait done by someone like Eakins would surely have helped enshrine her reputation among the city’s cultural elite. In her book Philadelphia: The Place and the People, Repplier complains that “the Quaker City lacked discriminating enthusiasm for her own children…which enabled more zealous towns to rend the skies with shrill paeans of applause.” She adds, “If mistaking geese for swans produces sad confusion…the mistaking of swans for geese may also be a serious error. The birds either languish or fly away to keener air.” What Repplier had in mind were those Philadelphians who left the city for more welcoming environments, but what can be more welcoming than an offer from an artistic master to enshrine you in his portrait gallery of notable Philadelphians? 

Repplier’s writing career lasted 65 years, yet in order to experience the fullness of her reading public’s appreciation, she had to travel to Boston.  George Stewart Stokes concludes, “If her head had been understandably turned by Boston, it was swiftly unturned again by Philadelphia. Back home, she was merely Agnes Repplier, a relatively insignificant writer living quietly west of the Schuylkill. Here she found no open-arms reception and this in spite of her ‘triumph’ in Boston. Here she found only obscurity, the obscurity, she felt, that is Philadelphia itself.” 

While the essayist never married, she did travel with a special unmarried lady friend, Cornelia Frothingham, who was from an old Philadelphia family. “If the truth be admired,” Stokes writes, “Miss Repplier was not the kind to offer men encouragement. Her wit and cleverness were generally far too brilliant for all but the hardest. She may very well have frightened more than she attracted — and this in spite of the fact that by her own frequent, free admission she much preferred the company of men to that of women and was to number not a few of the most important of her day among her friends.”

She also found solace in her cats, especially Agrippina. “Cats like quiet people. They heartily approve of a sedentary life. Cats are without morals,” she wrote,” and they are perfectly democratic. Dogs are snobs, preferring a mate of their own class. But as for cats, any old tom in the alley will please them. Consider Agrippina. She had a black lover, an alley lover. But he suited her. She was completely satisfied with him even if he had never seen the inside of a decent home. Agrippina was democratic. And Agrippina was the best of all.”

Although hardly a libertine, she disapproved of Prohibition and, like G.K. Chesterton, appreciated the joys of wine and beer. 

She was not, as her biographer noted, a social aristocrat, “not by birth; she belonged in a far more worthy class, for hers was an intellectual aristocracy.” 

Her life was also devoted to her brother Louis, mentally slow from birth who would live to be eighty years old. Repplier supported him after the death of Mr. Repplier; Louis, for his part, worked a menial job at Philadelphia General Hospital. She looked after his needs as best she could although sometimes the task was exasperating for her. When she was once accused of not keeping him in better clothes, she wrote to her friend Harrison Morris that. “To dress him cleanly and decently would be a bagatelle….But he is unhappily unhinged in this regard. I can do nothing with him.” But she did visit him once or twice a week for five years when he was in a Germantown nursing home after being struck by a car in the city. She would travel out from Center City in good and bad weather because she believed that Louis was her responsibility. Immediately after Louis’ death and burial in the churchyard at Saint John’s, Repplier remarked to someone, “Well, it’s a blessed relief that Louis is at his rest—and so convenient to Wanamaker’s!” 

Agnes Repplier died on December 15, 1950, and after a Solemn High Requiem Mass at Saint John the Evangelist Church on 13th Street in Center City, and was buried in the same family vault. Her obituary states that friends do not send flowers. 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.