Last year, I moved into an apartment where I would live alone for the first time. As I unpacked, I felt light-headed from the realization that my belongings would not have to negotiate for space with anyone else’s. I placed my containers of pasta and tea into empty kitchen cabinets, hung my art and posters on tabula rasa walls. I embraced the new experience of being able to leave the sink full of dirty dishes without annoying anyone (that is, aside from my future self, who would have to wash them eventually). After living with housemates for almost a decade, being alone in an apartment felt strange, untethered. It also felt a bit like freedom.

My ambivalent feelings about aloneness are amplified by our present moment. The lingering effects of Covid-19 lockdowns and the algorithmic echo chambers of social media have created a world in which solitude appears to be everywhere. On the cover of the February 2025 issue of the Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson proclaims our present age “The Anti-Social Century.” In the feature, he argues that self-imposed solitude is a major factor in many contemporary social issues, from male loneliness to political polarization. To explain why people would choose to spend time alone yet feel isolated and dissatisfied, Thompson’s analysis looks only as far back as the mid-twentieth century for historical precedents, and calls upon usual suspects like the popularization of the television and mobile phone. 

From analyses like Thompson’s, solitude might be taken as a recent trend, spurred by harmful technology and sowing discord and division. In fact, human practices of aloneness have a much longer history—and one that is less uniformly negative. For centuries, people have intentionally sought solitude. In some societies, a solitary person could be valued and supported by the community, rather than maligned or suspected. Someone who chose to live alone, outside the regular workings of their society, could still have a strong social safety net and continue to interact with others in their own way. Solitude has also historically been a powerful choice for women, who have often faced disproportionate expectations to give up aspects of their autonomy in order to shoulder the labour that makes society function: domestic work, reproduction, childcare. For these women, solitude offered a way to reclaim their independence, time and resources. 

Over three hundred years ago, in the place known as Tiohtià:ke to the Kanien’kehá:ka and Mooniyang to the Anishinaabeg—currently labelled on colonial maps as Montreal—one such woman threw herself into a life of solitude. In August 1695 in the French settlement known at the time as Ville-Marie, the thirty-three-year-old Jeanne Le Ber became a religious recluse, withdrawing from secular society to focus on prayer and solitary contemplation. As a recluse, or anchorite, Le Ber was voluntarily and permanently confined to her dwelling within the since-destroyed church of Notre-Dame-de-Pitié in what is today’s Old Port neighbourhood. Le Ber lived in a narrow, sparsely furnished apartment, with a window that gave into the church and a view of its altar. Her biographer, the Sulpician priest François Vachon de Belmont, writing of her dedication to prayer beyond any worldly concerns, described Le Ber as leading the life of angels.

In contrast with our contemporary solitude, regarded as a serious problem needing to be solved, religious solitude has long been a Christian ideal. In the third century after Jesus Christ’s death, some believers fled their bustling Mediterranean cities into rural parts of Egypt and Syria, where they lived as hermits. The lives of these ascetics revolved around prayer and the performance of sometimes-incredible spiritual feats. One of the most famous, Saint Simeon the Stylite, is said to have lived on top of a pillar for over thirty years. Later, medieval monasteries were built to assist in the pursuit of spiritual perfection through separation from the secular world, attempting to create Christian utopias in small, devout societies far from the public eye or worldly concerns. In late medieval Europe, the urban recluse became a prominent figure, embodying strict solitude in the heart of the city. Almost every medieval town had its own anchorite. Most of these recluses were women, who often opted to become recluses either in widowhood or as an alternative to marriage.

Solitude away from the world’s distractions was seen as highly prestigious, a sign of spiritual insight and special ability. Monasteries, even far-flung ones, received donations from the faithful, as did medieval urban recluses. This prestige could sometimes challenge the very solitude that it admired. Because of their dedication to solitude and prayer, recluses were often seen as well-respected religious authorities, and this reputation brought people to their doorsteps seeking guidance or conversation. Desert ascetics like Simeon attracted followers and disciples. According to a fifteenth-century hagiography, or spiritual biography, a whole host of characters visited the Flemish recluse Pirona Hergods, including priests, devout women, nobility, soldiers stationed nearby and even people thought to be possessed by demons. If local powers did not appreciate their spiritual views, however, recluses could face harsh consequences. In 1417, Catherine, an anchorite in Montpellier, France, was condemned and executed on charges of heresy for having allegedly questioned the importance of the sacraments and the doctrine of purgatory.

Paradoxically, people embracing solitude could become, in some ways, more dependent on society. Being confined to one place meant that recluses or solitary ascetics needed social support to access the basic necessities of life, like food and water. They placed themselves in the landscape accordingly. Simeon’s pillar was at the crossroads of two ancient highways near modern-day Aleppo. Urban recluses lived next to busy parish churches, or on city walls or bridges, places where people would frequently pass by their windows. Even in a life of spiritual solitude, they were never really alone.

The urban recluse became less common after the end of the medieval period in the sixteenth century, but did not disappear entirely. In the 1630s, for example, the former-nun-turned-recluse Jeanne de Cambry wrote mystical texts and dispensed marriage advice in the city of Lille. Reclusion even found its way to seventeenth-century Ville-Marie, when Jeanne Le Ber became the first known recluse on this land. Although it has waned in popularity as a religious method, it feels like in some ways reclusion has never really gone away. The shape of my own life can sometimes look similar to these earlier practices of solitude that I research as part of my academic career. My friends and family occasionally tease me for behaving too much like the recluses I study, staying home reading and writing all day. While I wouldn’t call myself a recluse—and no one would describe my life as one of angels—I sometimes feel a kind of kinship with these women who were able to find solitary spaces within their societies.

We know about Le Ber primarily from the hagiography that Vachon de Belmont wrote about her after her death in 1714. It was part of a report that, as the head of the Sulpician religious society in Ville-Marie, he sent to his fellow priests in France to showcase examples of holy lives in the colony. He claimed that Le Ber’s exceptional piety was evidence of the divine favour granted to the settlement, hoping to convince them that her intense commitment to religious life proved that God would continue to provide examples of saintliness in New France. He might have thought that an example of holy life was particularly needed during a period in which the colony was moving away from its missionary origins and becoming a centre for trade, and was in danger of receiving less support from the French metropole. Vachon de Belmont presented Le Ber as an exemplary colonial saint, whose holiness should justify and inspire the missionary project.

Jeanne Le Ber was born into a wealthy family in Ville-Marie. Her French-born parents had come to Turtle Island in the 1650s, in the early days of the colony. Her father, Jacques Le Ber, was an influential merchant, and her mother, also named Jeanne, belonged to the well-known Le Moyne family of soldiers and explorers. Le Ber’s life is intertwined with the history of the colony; when she was born in 1662, her godparents were none other than two founders of the settlement, Jeanne Mance and Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve. Today, their names are associated with many features of Montreal’s cultural and geographic landscape, like the classic picnic spot Parc Jeanne-Mance. As a young girl, Le Ber was sent to the monastery school of the Ursuline Sisters in Quebec City, where her aunt lived as a nun. At the school, she would have been educated in reading, writing and practical skills, including embroidery, for which the Ursulines—an order of teaching nuns—were famous. According to Vachon de Belmont, the monastery school is where Le Ber became particularly interested in religion and devotion.

At the age of fourteen, Le Ber was summoned back to Ville-Marie to begin preparations for marriage. As a young woman from a notable family, Le Ber would have been a desirable catch, and had many potential suitors. However, she refused to marry. Instead, she dedicated herself to performing spiritual devotions in a room in her father’s house. According to Vachon de Belmont, Le Ber was imitating the medieval saint Catherine of Siena, famous for her fasting and other ascetic practices, who similarly began her religious life in her natal household rather than joining a monastery or religious community right away. For several years, Le Ber embraced a life of seclusion in her family’s home. She was assigned a spiritual director, not uncommon for recluses, who told her to leave home only to attend church, and to do so early in the morning, when she would see the fewest number of people. She took successive vows of chastity and perpetual virginity, sealing the deal against any future marriage. 

Le Ber’s next step was to become a recluse within a church. The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, a nearby community of religious women, had been founded by the French missionary and teaching sister Marguerite Bourgeoys several decades earlier with the aim of setting up schools for the local children. On the premises of this community, Le Ber and her father financed the construction of a church, with an apartment behind its high altar. At the age of thirty-three, Le Ber was formally enclosed as a recluse in this building, never to exit again until her death. There, in her secluded dwelling—sometimes called in, religious terms, a cell, anchorhold or reclusorium—Le Ber embraced the ideals of solitude and asceticism even more intensely than before, mirroring the aims of the desert ascetics in spatial removal from the secular world. 

Her church and anchorhold, however, were in the middle of the Ville-Marie settlement. Like medieval urban recluses, she could hardly avoid talking to the people who lived near her cell. While enclosed, she received visitors like family members, the bishop and her spiritual director. The sisters of the congregation regularly brought her food, and, presumably, carried away her chamber pots. Le Ber was also intimately involved in key aspects of her colonial society. Vachon de Belmont describes her works of embroidery that decorated the colony’s churches as material proof of Christianity’s glory, and an indirect tool for conversion and maintaining Catholicism among inhabitants. He also writes of the local population’s belief that her prayers provided protection during moments of crisis. 

When a group of English ships were bearing down on the present-day Island of Montreal, hoping to add it to their nation’s growing Atlantic territories, Le Ber assured a religious sister that the Virgin Mary would shield her namesake colony. Le Ber then inscribed a picture of the saint with a prayer, a talisman to protect the congregation’s grain storehouse. The local labourers, or habitants, saw this and brought their own images to Le Ber, begging her to write protective prayers on them; when she refused, they made off with the congregation’s talisman and Le Ber was obliged to create another. As an anchorite, Le Ber was a public figure, sought out for her special skills and spiritual power. In the context of the fragile colony, she was seen by some as a spiritual beacon, proving that Ville-Marie had divine favour on its side.

From one point of view, Le Ber could be seen as refusing to participate in her colonial society by shutting herself away from it all, and not contributing to the colony’s birthrate or the conversion of non-Christians (at least not directly). The story of the habitants requesting her prayers suggests that she really did not want to be bothered. From another vantage point, however, Le Ber is fundamentally embedded in her colonial society, her very seclusion from it used to justify its religious importance. Her story can perhaps show how we are all caught up in our societies, even if we desire to escape them. When I’m sitting in my apartment alone, watching cooking or cat videos and enjoying my own company, I am still a part of the social world that lies beyond my apartment walls. 

According to her hagiography, Le Ber became a recluse with specific goals in mind—some of which resonate with contemporary women’s experiences of social and solitary life. Le Ber’s goals, as listed by Vachon de Belmont, would in some way safeguard her autonomy: avoiding marriage, continuing to manage her own finances and not being compelled to perform any of the tasks necessary to daily life in a family or monastery, such as cooking, cleaning, keeping track of expenses or assigning chores and duties. In other words, Le Ber desired to maintain control over her key resources: her money and her time. 

The life of a church recluse, or any lifestyle that requires strict confinement to one space, might seem repellent today. Yet Le Ber’s justifications for choosing solitude mirror choices made by some present-day women, for whom aloneness can bring about greater autonomy. Single women today report greater happiness than men of the same group, according to a 2024 study conducted at the University of Toronto. Lead author of the study Elaine Hoan attributes this in part to factors like financial independence and less domestic and emotional labour. In their 2024 book Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, journalist Heather Hansen and psychology professors Netta Weinstein and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen discuss the potential power of aloneness when decoupled from loneliness, framing personal solitude as “a shelter to house the inner resources that help us make sense of our world.” This can be especially important for women, who have historically sought solo spaces as places of refuge and creativity. As Virginia Woolf famously claimed in her 1929 essay, “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.” Though Le Ber’s reclusion might seem extreme, it exists within a longer history, stretching into the present day, of women seeking solitude to create space for versions of themselves less beholden to social pressures.

Women who choose aloneness can face social stigma, with terms like “cat lady” or “old maid” still stuck in our cultural vocabulary. Today, some are enacting creative challenges to the notion that their choice of solitude is something to be frowned upon. The Hermettes, members of a New York City-based semi-secret society for women who identify as (non-religious) hermits, want to reclaim the power of solitude. In the society’s magazine, editor Risa Mickenberg writes that solitude proposes “a way to disconnect from the clamour of the social networks, from the pull of feeling needed” and “helps women cultivate clarity, perspective, detachment, and deep thought.” The magazine features writing, art and interviews that explore the textures and possibilities of solitude, like a tongue-in-cheek photo essay about the liberation of ignoring expectations of proper dress and sleeping in your clothes, or a proposal that the double crab emoji be understood to mean “united in solitude,” used to “signal your affection for people while letting them know that you don’t feel like talking to them.” From Le Ber’s isolation within an anchorhold to the Hermettes’ humorous tactics, the choice of solitude can be a radical way for women to carve out space simply to exist outside the categories of wife and mother.

My experience of living alone for the first time is different in many ways from Le Ber’s life as a recluse. For one, I can leave whenever I choose, and, to my relief, no one comes to my window seeking intercessory prayers. However, both our lives are examples of voluntary solitude that does not exclude social interactions and relationships. Le Ber, despite her status as anchorite, did not lose contact with her friends, family and neighbours: she only changed the terms on which those relationships would operate. Humans are social creatures, and it’s easy to see how aloneness can slide into loneliness, or how solitude can acquire associations of fear and negativity. But figures like Jeanne Le Ber give us a more nuanced view of solitude and help us to grasp its broader contexts and benefits—especially for women. Her life shows that solitude, even when lived confined within four walls, need not be understood as a prison. Rather than limiting her, it allowed Le Ber a certain freedom that might have otherwise been difficult to access. Solitude can be constraining, but it doesn’t have to be. For some people, it might open doors—or anchorhold windows—onto worlds of possibility.  ⁂

Laura Moncion is a researcher and writer interested in history, religion, gender and mysticism. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.