I love reading about nuns and convents - it must be something to do with the fact that I'm Catholic (lapsed) and attended a mission school from the age of six to 17.
Here is a list of books set in convents (schools as well as nunneries) that I've read and enjoyed:
Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy by Rumer Godden
Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden
The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien
Frost in May by Antonia Frost
Quiet as a Nun (Jemima Shore Mysteries) by Antonia Fraser
New Habits by Isabel Losada (Non-fiction)
There's Something About a Convent Girl by Jackie Bennett And Rosemary Forgan (Non-fiction)
Nun the worse for it
LENT began on Feb 6, most unfortunately for Chinese Catholics who sat down to reunion dinners on that very day.
How did they reconcile the feasting synonymous with the Lunar New Year with the Christian season of fasting, penitence and prayer? I try to imagine giving up pineapple jam tarts and break out in a cold sweat.
A friend has suggested I give up reading instead – lordy! Perhaps, as penance, I should simply read books that I’ve hitherto found indigestible: anything by Charles Dickens for starters – as bad/good as self-flagellation; a little bit of Sylvia Plath – akin, in my opinion, to walking several miles with peas in one’s shoes; some Rushdie – sackcloth and ashes.
I’m Catholic and my primary and secondary schools were convents – back in the days when nuns still lived and taught there.
Of course, like many Catholic girls, I had a period of wanting to take the veil. The nuns at my schools shared a car and played hockey. It didn’t seem like such a bad life.
Even to this day I love books set in convents – although Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeleine puzzles me. Is Miss Clavell a nun? She dresses like one but I can’t imagine a convent with just one nun lording it over 12 little girls “in two straight lines”. Poetic licence I guess....
Rumer Godden has written a number of very good novels about women in holy orders, but very few remain in print.
By the way, I don’t like it when nuns are portrayed as either battle axes or else jolly, fat things (I’m probably the only person in the world who is not entertained by Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg as a con-artist masquerading as a nun).
Even worse is the stereotype of the beautiful young girl who becomes a bride of Christ because it’s the only way she can forget the dashing young man who died in the war/broke her heart/turned out to be a spy or married or a fairy, etc.
One of my favourite books set in a convent is Frost in May by Antonia White. It tells the story of Nanda Gray, the nine-year-old daughter of a Catholic-convert who, eager to do the “right thing”, enrols his daughter at the Convent of the Five Wounds.
The book describes, in fine and painful detail, Nanda’s life at the boarding school run by nuns, and the convent is based on the one attended by the author when she was a girl.
I was much more taken with the portrayal of Five Wounds than I was with Enid Blyton’s romp-fests at Mallory Towers and St Clare’s. The world of the convent is a punishing, dark and depressing one, but Nanda’s experiences certainly seemed more romantic than Darrell Rivers’: suffering is always more attractive when you are a melodramatic Catholic teenager whose crushes are all altar boys, half of whom talk about becoming priests!
Frost in May is not a children’s book, but as Elizabeth Bowen, in an introduction to the Virago Modern Classics’ edition, observes, it is a novel written using the framework of the classic children’s school story (like Blyton’s, Susan M. Coolidge’s What Katy Did in School or Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Dimsie series): a young girl’s uncertain start at a new school, her struggles to adapt and make friends, her acceptance by her peers, her progress through the years.
However, as Bowen points out, unlike school stories written for children, this one has a sad end. Tragedy and violence are not unusual in children’s books these days though.
The average 21st century teenager will probably be puzzled by the fuss made in the final pages of the book. What a song and dance about nothing, she might exclaim, having expected the tragic end referred to in Amazon reviews to involve bloody death, rape or maiming.
Still, only teenagers (possibly also adults with total recall of their adolescence) can truly comprehend the extent of the humiliation felt by a young person simply as a result of being misunderstood. For everyone else, White does a good job of evoking the utter devastation, the hollowness in the stomach, the heart in one’s mouth, the sensation of falling from a great height and watching yourself from a distance (all clichés, but only because they are true and real and inevitable) as your world falls slowly but surely apart.
Great books....I found similar books for my kids from BiggerBooks store through Couponalbum.com site at lowest prices.....!
Posted by: Ashley | Tuesday, March 04, 2008 at 18:14