24 Facts About Fanny Allen

Fanny Allen was born in a house built by her father on the side of the Batten Kill in Sunderland, Vermont.

Fanny Allen's family moved to various settlements in Vermont in her youth, and Frances, who was called Fanny, spent her childhood in Burlington, Westminster, and Swanton.

Fanny Allen was educated at Middlebury Seminary, and had an interest in science.

Fanny Allen was not raised with a high regard for religion, and no consideration of religion was made in her education.

Fanny Allen's father was a skeptic of organized religion in the same philosophical camp as Thomas Paine, and her step-father regarded the affectations of the religious people of his time and era as "pretentious".

Four years later, when she was 21, Fanny Allen asked permission of her parents to go to Montreal.

Fanny Allen stated that her intention was to continue her education by studying French, but her true motive was perhaps an intellectual curiosity about the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church, even though she had never heard anything but disparaging vilifications of it.

Fanny Allen's parents consented to sending her to Montreal, but first required her to be baptized by the Rev Daniel Barber, an Anglican priest of Claremont, New Hampshire, and later to be a convert to Catholicism himself.

Fanny Allen, who was strongly irreligious at the time, strongly objected, but consented in order to please her mother.

Fanny Allen became a pupil of the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame at Montreal in 1807.

Fanny Allen smiled at the request, and had no intention of honoring it.

When Fanny Allen attempted to step into the sanctuary she supposedly found herself unable to do so, as if she were blocked by some invisible force.

Fanny Allen did not immediately inform her teachers of this event but waited some time before making a confession and a formal rejection of her Protestantism.

Fanny Allen's conversion was all the more remarkable for her decision to become a nun as well.

When Fanny Allen visited the Hotel-Dieu de Montreal with her mother, she was immediately struck by a painting that was hanging above the altar of the chapel there.

Fanny Allen, amazed, remarked to her mother that the image of Saint Joseph matched exactly the appearance of the man who had saved her from the river creature at the age of 12.

Since Fanny Allen was at first unknown to the Mother Superior as she entered the Hotel-Dieu, Fanny Allen was asked to spend a year at the boarding school of the Sisters of the Congregation before being received into the novitiate of the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph.

Fanny Allen consented, and a year passed before she was received into the novitiate on September 29,1808.

Fanny Allen's parents came to some peace of mind at their daughter's decision after a visit in the spring of 1809.

Fanny Allen spent the rest of her life as a nurse, working in the hospital's apothecary.

Fanny Allen served as an interpreter for English-speaking patients and cared for wounded combatants in the War of 1812.

Fanny Allen died of complications from a lung disease on September 10,1819, at the Hotel-Dieu, aged 34, and was buried under the chapel there.

Mrs Julia Smalley of Swanton, the daughter of a personal acquaintance of Fanny Allen, gave the following description of her:.

Fanny Allen's complexion was fair, her eyes dark blue, with a singular depth and calmness of expression, while the dignity and ease of her manners gave quiet evidence to the refinement and loveliness of her character.