2 Novels About Complicated Nuns

Dear readers,

What a joy to begin this column from a place of abundance! Forbidding, austere, often terrifying, occasionally ecstatic abundance!

I’m talking, of course, about nuns in literature.

Though I come from a mixed-faith family, I have basically zero real-life experience with Catholicism and its servants. So my research for this newsletter has been eye-opening. I knew about Muriel Spark’s allegorical treatment of Watergate enacted by a cunning abbess (only you, Muriel). Ditto Denis Diderot’s “La Religieuse,” which began as an extended literary prank and somehow became a proto-Enlightenment cri de coeur.

But there’s more. I dare you to remain unmoved by the correspondence between the 12th-century philosopher-nun Héloïse and her illicit husband, Abelard, who was castrated after he impregnated her. (For good measure, both were then cloistered.) Nor can we forget Teresa of Ávila, exhaustive chronicler and enthusiast of mortifications of the flesh.

So, yes, nuns have provided a true buffet, even for us spiritual mongrels. Were this a semester-long seminar I could reach back to some of the very first women of God in literature (Chaucer’s Prioress, Margery Kempe) — but to meet the moment, here are two more recent treatments of literary sisters.

—Joumana