My 'interest' in nuns started long before I read Eileen Power's seminal (seminarial?) work. Unlike male monasteries, not many nunneries/female priories survive to any great extent ((even Lacock Abbey, in Wiltshire, has been 'transformed' into a mansion in the 16th and mid-18th centuries, although the retained cloisters are superb), so my youthful meanderings around Britain was spent amongst the ruins of castles and monkish abodes. My Tudors and Stuarts A Level course similarly concentrated on the monks at the Dissolution (as did David Knowles in his important surveys). However, on 28th October 1969, I bought Josephine Bell's Tudor Pilgrimage in the Fontana paperback edition, published the same year. The story of the nine inmates at the fictional St. Mary's Priory at Silfelde-on-Loddon, and their ejection into the turbulent world of the monstrous Henry VIII, is one that I have gone back to on several occasions. I quote from the back of the paperback: Dame Isobel, accused of treason against the King, finds herself the quarry of a witch-hunt; Dame Margery, mis-shapen and feeble-minded, stumbles upon a band of merciless tormentors; Elynor Snow, a reluctant novice, takes to the road with Thomas, the Priory gardener, posing as his wife; Elizabeth Tylney comes face to face with...a man she loved, desired - and feared. Great story - it captured me! I bought the first edition many years later.
Geoffrey Bles - 1967 Fontana Books - 1969
In my 'burst' of collecting and reading Muriel Spark novels, over twenty years ago, I purchased the first edition of her The Abbess of Crewe (1974); when I sold most of them subsequently, I retained the USA edition. I can do no better than quote Good Reads from the Internet: An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance...[it] is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and - plunged into scandal - the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry. Watergate (1972-4) anyone?! I tired of Spark's later books (rather as I did of Iris Murdoch's - though The Bell now springs to mind with its convent) but I have kept this one, as well as her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
The novel which has cast the greatest spell on me has been Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner that held Them (1948). It brilliantly describes the chronicles of Oby, a Benedictine convent in Eastern England in the later 14th century. The detail given to the effects of the Black Death, the fall of the convent spire, the Bishop's Visitation, an absconding nun, the squabbles, jealousies, boredoms and pleasure, is the work of sustained historical imagination. I must, I will, read this masterpiece again.
The Viking Press - 1974 Chatto & Windus - 1948
Two other novels are well worth reading, even if they are very different. Florence Barclay's The White Ladies of Worcester (1917) - the story of a gallant knight, a beautiful nun and a wise bishop - is very much of a period piece and is, perhaps, not for the palates of 21st century readers; but I liked it. Joanne Harris's Holy Fools (2003) is set in 17th century France and is a harrowing tale of witch trials, religious frenzy and regicide. Juliette's roller-coaster life, both inside and outside a convent, is graphically described. What is there not to like about a story of passion, secrets and murder - bad habits indeed! Told in the first person, one travels with Juliette along a road of trial and tribulation.
G. P. Putnam - 1917 Doubleday - 2003
Finally, (so far!) two novels written much earlier. The Abbess of Shaftesbury; or the Days of John of Gaunt by Anonymous (1846), I bought just eighteen months ago. I don't think my critical tastes have declined (if they have, I don't care) but, again, I enjoyed the tale set in Shaftesbury (Shaston Abbey) and then Lyddington, Wiltshire - not far from where I used to live. It is strongly anti Roman Catholic and its superstitious and idolatrous practices and the false arguments and vain quibbles whereby those practices were defended. The heroes are an amiable and enlightened disciple of Wickliffe and illustrious martyrs, such as John Huss and Jerome of Prague. Equally fierce in its condemnation of the celibate life is Denis Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse, 1796), which tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, forced to take the veil and who, stifled by boredom and claustrophobia, starts a lawsuit to obtain release. She falls victim to a licentious Mother Superior... I have yet to read it; can't wait!
F & J Rivington - 1846 NEL - 1966
Just to show I am not entirely enslaved by the printed page, I also have a small collection of DVDs on the same topic.
Ingrid Bergman as Deborah Kerr as Sister Mary Benedict - 1945 Sister Clodagh - 1947
Audrey Hepburn as Lilli Palmer as Sister Luke - 1958 Mother Katharine - 1960
Although Deborah Kerr and Ingrid Bergman both showed their fine acting talents in their respective films, Audrey Hepburn must always come top for me. Her story is an oft-told one - torn between her vocation and the tug of supporting a cause outside the cloister, she finally chooses the latter.
I pass over my DVDs of Sister Act (I and 2) and Nuns on the Run, to maintain a respectful approach to the cloister. However, I end on downward path. This year, I purchased The Nun (2018), fully expecting it to have some semblance to Diderot's novel. The plastic case should have forewarned me, with its graphic evil nun's face and the fact there was a Special Feature 'A New Horror Icon'. I watched maybe twenty minutes, then had to turn it off. Anyone can make a mistake.
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