Sister M. Madeleva — the poet who built a college

1887–1964 · SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, ITS POET AND ITS PRESIDENT

The tie. Mary Evaline Wolff was born in Cumberland, Wisconsin, in 1887, graduated from Saint Mary's College in 1909, and took her doctorate at Berkeley in 1925. As Sister M. Madeleva, C.S.C., she taught English at Saint Mary's for fifteen years and served as its president from 1934 — the college stands at Notre Dame, in the unincorporated community across the river from South Bend, printed as the city's own school in every city file of this record. The printed obituary of the Herald Statesman (Yonkers, New York) records that she was "nationally known as a poet, author and educator," and Poetry Foundation's record dates her presidency to 1961; she led the Catholic Poetry Society of America for part of the 1940s.

The verse. She published twelve or thirteen volumes of verse among more than twenty books. The shelf in order: Knights Errant, and Other Poems (1923), which appeared while she was still at Berkeley; the essays Chaucer's Nuns (1925) and the study Pearl: A Study in Spiritual Dryness (1925); Penelope, and Other Poems (1927); Gates and Other Poems; A Lost Language, and Other Essays (1951); American Twelfth Night, and Other Poems (1955); The Four Last Things: Collected Poems (1959); Conversations with Cassandra (1961). The prose memoir My First Seventy Years (Macmillan, 1959) was commissioned by Macmillan, went through several editions, and sold well in hardcover and paperback both — a commercial life unusual for a nun's book. Her life's work, on the record of her advisers and her own papers, was educational: she internationalized the college she led. She died in Boston on 25 July 1964.

Sources:

1. American National Biography (Oxford University Press) — the Wolff biography: the Saint Mary's graduation of 1909, the Berkeley doctorate of 1925, the presidency 1934–1961, and the bibliography from Knights Errant (1923) through Conversations with Cassandra (1961), with My First Seventy Years (Macmillan, 1959).
2. Poetry Foundation, author record — the twelve or thirteen volumes of verse, twenty-plus books, and the presidency dates.
3. Herald Statesman (Yonkers, N.Y.), 27 July 1964, obituaries — the presidency, the MacMillan memoir, the Catholic Poetry Society presidency, and the death at Boston on 25 July 1964.