'The Independence of Her Spacious Mind'

The finest tribute to one writer by another I’ve read of late is John Lukacs’ “Agnes Repplier, Writer and Essayist.” Repplier (1855-1950) published perhaps one-thousand essays during a writing career of seventy years. Lukacs unabashedly admires her and her work and convinces me that Repplier may be the most unjustly forgotten of American writers. His thirty-six-page essay generously quotes her work (she’s eminently quotable, as is Lukacs) and serves as an excellent introduction to so strong-willed and idiosyncratic a writer. She’s an excellent antidote to such earlier nineteenth-century Americans as the pallid Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lukacs writes: “She read everything; indeed, what she reread would be sufficient unto a department of English in our colleges now. One of the most attractive features of her writing is its unpredictability: neither frivolous nor impulsive, it sprang from the independence of her spacious mind.” Repplier was able to support herself, her mother and sister with…