Agnes Repplier
The late nineteenth century saw the personal essay gain a firm foothold in American literary culture, as writers used the form to engage readers on subjects ranging from history and manners to literature and daily life. Agnes Repplier was born in Philadelphia in 1855 and worked within that period as a writer, essayist, and biographer, contributing to a form that rewarded careful observation and a cultivated prose style.
Repplier was educated at the Agnes Irwin School in Philadelphia, and she went on to build a career that spanned an exceptionally long stretch of American literary life, from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Among her works, the essay collection In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers offers a direct example of the kind of writing she produced. She was an American citizen who worked across both essay and biography, and she remained connected to Philadelphia throughout her life, having been born there and having died there in December 1950 at the age of ninety-five.
Recognition for her work came in the form of two honors: the Laetare Medal and the Siena Medal. These awards mark a concrete measure of the regard in which Repplier was held as a writer and essayist. Her death in Philadelphia in 1950 closed a career that had run for decades, and the medals she received stand as the clearest record the facts provide of how her peers and contemporaries assessed her contribution to American letters.
Quotes by Agnes Repplier
Agnes Repplier's insights on:
A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy.
A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candour.
It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.
Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.
The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses...
Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.