Literature

Leaving the Fold

The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir.

June 20, 2024 issue

Love in Plague Time

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

January 16, 2020 issue

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Harrisburg: The Politics of Salvation

By 1970 Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a devout nun in the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and an art history teacher at Marymount College, had been transformed by the recent revolution in the Church and the political turbulence of the 1960s. Then in 1970, she was arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

June 1, 1972 issue

Proust’s Way?

“When it comes to a master stylist like Proust, a translator’s aim should be to capture both the luster of Proust’s insights and the stylistic pitch of his sentences.” 

December 1, 2005 issue

Proustifications

“To practice writing love letters, as Balzac said, improves a writer’s style. But Proust’s turn out also to be a store of fragments that will find their way, years ahead, in A la recherche.”

July 21, 1983 issue

Proust the Passionate Reader

“Only a few people belong to the secret order of sincere and insightful readers whom Proust respects, and among whom there exists a powerful complicity.”

April 4, 2013 issue

Proust’s Jewish Question

The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.

June 26, 2025 issue