Nuns behaving badly – or well.

A comparison between the portrayal of convent schools in Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933) and Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941).

When Carmen Callil read Antonia White’s novel, first published in 1933,  it reminded her so much of her convent-school days in Australia that she founded Virago Modern Classics in order to republish it.  Callil, unlike that other Australian Germaine Greer, had nothing good to say about the nuns who taught her. Greer, on the other hand, attributes her lifelong independence of mind to the fact that she was ‘socialized’ by ‘mad women in flapping black habits’, and she believes ‘they really loved us.’ (She was educated by Presentation nuns, many of them Irish.)

If the nuns in Frost in May love the girls in their charge, it is a very tough love indeed. The nuns aim to produce  ‘not accomplished women, nor agreeable wives,  but soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude’.  White, whose real name was Eirene Botting, was sent to the exclusive Sacred Heart Convent boarding-school in Roehampton in 1908 (at the age of 9) by her father, a Classical scholar and recent convert to Catholicism.  (White’s mother also converted, but neither in life nor in fiction did her daughter grant her much importance.) White fictionalizes this convent in Frost in May as the Convent of the Five Wounds, and herself as Nanda Grey, the only child of converts. Nanda falls with ready fascination into the stately routines of the school, presided over by teaching nuns who are, according to personality, tough and breezy, elegant and sarcastic, or aloof and regal;  Mother Radcliffe, addressing the school, pauses before each word ‘as if words themselves, having been used by so many people…must have the dust blown off them before they were fit for her use’. The order is French but the nuns are all English. The pupils at the school range from daughters of the nobility to decidedly middle-class children of teachers and other professionals, like Nanda herself.  There are holiday days, games, stories told in the evenings by firelight that are as terrifying as only religious stories can be.  There are also bathetic, hilarious stories of the foundress’s spiritual evolution, stories that have firm basis in the life of Sophie Barat, the real-life foundress of the Sacred Heart nuns. (Of the foundress’s brother’s training of her: ‘Knowing she was scared of firearms, he would fire off revolvers in her presence to strengthen her courage’.)  In the day-to-day life of the school, huge significance is attached to the smallest action and even gesture, and the children are under constant surveillance.  Nanda is regarded by the nuns as ‘proud’ and occasionally singled out for ridicule.   Still, she grows devoted to the school, and to her friends there, even after the Reverend Mother advises her to make friends among her own social class instead of ‘running after’ her aristocratic German-French friend.   Nanda is getting the hang of it, but she does something she regards as harmless (writing a racy novel in which everyone will be redeemed in the end) which the nuns regard as quite serious, and her father is asked to take her away. Bitter and angry with her, he says some unforgiveable things.  Something like this happened to White herself, according to Jane Dunn’s biography,  and White believed for years that she had been expelled, until one of the Roehampton nuns told her that her father had taken her away because he was disgusted at how  the nuns were allowing her to spend her time.

After the book was published, White received several letters from women who had attended this school from the 1880s to the 1920s, all of whom believed that she was writing about their time in the convent, so little did the routines and atmosphere of the school change over forty years. American author Mary McCarthy who was sent to Forest Ridge Sacred Heart Convent in Seattle when she was eleven (1921) commented that all the Sacred Heart schools were the same:

In the year I came to the Seattle Mesdames, at four o-clock on any weekday afternoon in Roscrea, Ireland, or Roehampton,England, or Menlo Park, California, the same tiny old whiskered nun was reading, no doubt, from Emma or A Tale Of Two Cities to a long table of girls stitching French seams or embroidering…..

The motherless McCarthy had mainly happy memories of these nuns.

Kate O’Brien also had happy memories of a convent boarding-school, which she fictionalised inThe Land  of Spices. Sainte-Famille, like the Five Wounds, is a French-founded order with mainly Irish teaching nuns. Kitty O’Brien (she only became Kate when she went to England) was sent, after her mother’s death in the early years of the twentieth century, to board at the Faithful Companions of Jesus convent at Laurel Hill, a mile or so from her home in Limerick city. So O’Brien, like White, is drawing on her own experience, but it’s a far more positive one. In The Land of Spices, little Anna Murphy is sent to boarding school at the age of 6, from a difficult family life  involving two self-indulgent, immature parents.   She soon becomes the pet of the school, and its personalities and routines are relayed through her child’s perception.  Spices differs from Frost in being told from two points of view, that of the girl Anna, and that of the Reverend Mother Marie-Helene, the Englishwoman Helen Archer.  It is similar to White’s book in its vivid evocation of the convent and its everyday routines, small treats and concerts and holidays, crushes and crazes.  The petty tyranny of one teaching nun is set against the sardonic affection of another, and the enthusiastic sportiness of yet another. It is revealed as the novel progresses that Mother Marie-Helene entered the convent for all the wrong reasons, but that she has grown to love her vocation and to make the best of it. For Anna,   the convent with its role models of non-domestic, scholarly women is a stepping-stone to the independent intellectual life she craves.

The Land of Spices might have been O’Brien’s ‘answer’ to White’s Frost in May, but it wasn’t in any sense an argument ‘for’ convent schools; the setting of the convent is incidental in O’Brien’s novel, which is really about growing up and growing older.  Frost in May is more directly about a convent school, but its  story is one of cruelly cut-off artistic promise (hence the book’s title).  But many non-Catholic and indeed, non-convent-educated readers believed that Frost was info-novel cum hatchet-job; Elizabeth Bowen’s  introduction to the 1946 edition presents it as an ‘exposé’ of ‘Rome’  getting the child young (‘We are very naïve’, she comments, that first person plural a magnificent assumption that all readers are Protestant.)  Frost was not banned in Ireland, but Spices was, because of a reference to (male) homosexuality.

Nuns created, animated and dominated entire little worlds, worlds with their own traditions and customs and values, worlds where girls, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’,  were encouraged to think of themselves as spiritually significant. (In Spices, ‘Molly, who was a very innocent girl, believed herself to be very wicked indeed’ – and revels in the notoriety this gives her.)  Even in Antonia White’s negative portrayal of one of these worlds, the self-sufficiency and rigour and sheer elegance of the institution shines out brightly.  Did nuns do more harm than good or more good than harm, in these ‘courts and camps and totalitarian states’ as Mary Colum, another former convent girl, called them? Or is it as impossible to generalize about them as it is to generalize about any kind of power, anywhere?

Antonia White, Frost in May (London: Harmsworth 1933: Virago Modern Classic 1981).

Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices (London: Heinemann 1941; Dublin: Arlen House 1983).

Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (London: Penguin 1957).

Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (N.Y 1928, 1947).

Germaine Greer’s contribution to J.Bennett & R.Forgan (eds.) There’s Something About A Convent Girl (London: Virago 1991).

Lennie Goodings, A Bite of the Apple: a life with books, writers and Virago (Oxford University Press 2020).

Jane Dunn, Antonia White (London: Jonathan Cape 1998).

clearclassicsblog 6

About Clear Classics: I’m Caitriona Clear and I’ve been an avid reader since the age of 4. This blog is about some of my favourite books published in the mid-twentieth century, but I’ll be going further back sometimes, and also coming up as far as the 1960s and 70s.

RECENT READS:

Niamh Mulvey The Amendments (London: Picador 2024). This story of Dolores and her daughter Nell is best evocation I have ever read of being female and feminist in 1980s Ireland (and as an Irish woman in England), and the most respectful treatment I’ve ever read of religious movements and their seductions. For Nell, the story is a gay coming-of-age, but the book, in its refusal of easy answers about either males or sex or religion, is quite hard-hitting. The amendments which bookend the narrative are the 1983 abortion amendment, and the marriage equality amendment of 2015, but in no way is this book a political tract. After reading it I went out and bought a copy for a friend.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise (London: Wildfire 2024). For much of this book I was irritated at the sneery, knowing tone – look at these jerks! Watch them screw up royally! What will they do next? It is a bit like the way Jonathan Franzen writes, with too much detail sometimes in dialogue, and you feel like shouting at the characters. Carl, the factory owner, is kidnapped for ransom in 1980 and the rest of the book is the unfolding of his family’s story after this trauma and the lives of his wife Ruth, sons Nathan and Beamer and daughter Jenny. But the story clips along so I stuck with it, and I was glad I did for the absolutely unexpected and beautiful epiphany of the last few chapters. I was crying with joy. So I really cared about the characters after all. There is also a very interesting reveal about who the kidnapper actually was, but to me that was secondary to the very moving redemptive scene. Is this a spoiler? Maybe. But stick with this book and you won’t be disappointed.