{"id":142582,"date":"2020-02-06T13:34:32","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T18:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142582"},"modified":"2020-02-06T13:34:32","modified_gmt":"2020-02-06T18:34:32","slug":"a-good-convent-should-have-no-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A Good Convent Should Have No History"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Eileen Power, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf<\/p><\/div>\n

When the visiting bishop arrives to inspect the ramshackle convent in Sylvia Townsend Warner\u2019s 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them<\/em>, he is distressed to find unmistakable evidence of unchaste activities. Instead of being greeted by peals of holy music, \u201chis hearing had been tormented by the yelpings of little dogs and the clatterings of egg-whisks.\u201d He finds the nuns devouring sweets in the dormitories, keeping pets, lounging on soft cushions; they wear perfumed mantles \u201cbetter befitting harlots than the brides of Christ\u201d; and this devout sisterhood appears to be \u201cbristling with quarrels and slanders.\u201d He considers that a household of nuns might be forgiven for careless stewardship of their financial assets, \u201csince women are ordained the weaker vessel and have no business sense.\u201d But when these natural infirmities are not compensated for by piety and devotion, this, concludes the disappointed bishop, is true depravity.<\/p>\n

\u201cA good convent,\u201d writes Warner with knowing irony, \u201cshould have no history. Its life is hid with Christ who is above. History is of the world, costly and deadly.\u201d The novel\u2014which covers three centuries in the life of Oby, a small Norfolk parish\u2014presents the humdrum minutiae of daily happenings, too insignificant (and worldly) to be recorded on the expensive vellum of medieval chronicles but making up the lives of the generations of unsung women who pass through these cloisters: the shard of eggshell found in a pancake, ants marching through the larder, intrigue over priory elections, and long nights spent in the treasury poring over accounts. The convent was founded in commemoration of a twelfth-century adulteress by a stern husband, eager that history should forget her ancient passion (now masked effectively by an ugly stone effigy), and dedicated to the patron saint of prisoners. As the nuns, bored at prayer, count up the women who have died in the convent before them, they know that their duty is to act as a group (\u201ca flock soberly ascending to a heavenly pasture\u201d) and retain a decorous anonymity. In any case, they see few opportunities to leave a mark on history. With the convent in the grip of poverty and all energies expended on attempts to balance revenues with expenditures, \u201cthere was no place for aberrations of individuality.\u201d \u201cIn songs and romances,\u201d writes Warner, \u201can apostate nun may be a romantic figure. God\u2019s Mother becomes her proxy in the convent and pins up the curtain before her frailties; but in real life she is a drab like any other drab, nursing her baby and eyeing her lover and the tankards from the tavern doorway.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,\u201d wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One<\/em>\u2019s Own<\/em> (1929). In that essay, commenting on the fact that women\u2019s lives are \u201call but absent from history,\u201d she argues that this is not only a consequence of the ways women have been deprived of the material conditions under which their talents can prosper but also reveals the sort of events and lives historians have traditionally considered worth remembering\u2014primarily, the public activities of \u201cgreat men.\u201d Perusing the index of G. M. Trevelyan\u2019s History of England<\/em>, Woolf looks up \u201cposition of women\u201d and is dismayed to find only a smattering of references, mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating, and the fictional heroines of Shakespeare. Flicking through chapters on wars and kings, she wonders why so little room is left for women\u2019s activities in the events that \u201cconstitute this historian\u2019s view of the past.\u201d It was clear to Woolf that new histories were needed, which would examine the reality of women\u2019s lives, their relationships and activities, and the forces that thwarted their ambitions. In the last year of her life, Woolf began work on a history of English literature that would uncover a range of \u201canonymous\u201d voices from the past. As bombers zipped low over her Sussex home, Woolf immersed herself in reading about witches, nuns, poets, actresses, servants, and governesses, eager to draw these \u201clives of the obscure\u201d together in an alternative portrait of English society, which would expose the way history was constructed and the voices it excluded. Looking for erudite, imaginative history writing that performed a similar excavation, she reread the very book to which Warner would turn a few years later when composing The Corner That Held Them<\/em>: an imposing seven-hundred-page tome titled Medieval English Nunneries<\/em>, by a young economic historian named Eileen Power.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Born in Cheshire in 1889, Power had studied at Girton, one of Cambridge University\u2019s first women\u2019s colleges, where she spoke at suffrage meetings alongside the leading feminists of her day. After a spell reading medieval history at the Sorbonne in Paris, Power received an offer of a fellowship at the newly established London School of Economics on a grant given specifically to support research into women\u2019s lives, in the hope that the monographs produced by fellows would form a much-needed canon of women\u2019s history. Power joined a radical faculty abuzz with new ideas for how history could be written.<\/p>\n

In the early years of the twentieth century, the fight for equal suffrage had sparked a growing interest in women\u2019s history and working-class history. Frustrated at their political disenfranchisement, women looked to the past for models and alternatives, eager to reread history through the lens of gender and power and to establish a historical framework from which to agitate for change. Power and her contemporaries\u2014among them the historians Alice Clark, Vera Anstey, and Ivy Pinchbeck\u2014huddled over Olive Schreiner\u2019s 1911 book Woman and Labour<\/em>, which argued that capitalism had systematically eroded women\u2019s productive labor and thus their independence; they devoured the work of Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, whose groundbreaking studies Prolegomena to the Study of Greek <\/em>Religion<\/em> (1908) and Themis<\/em> (1912) proposed that the origins of ancient Greek mythology and religion lay in much older worship, centered around the worship of powerful mother goddesses. When ideology wanted to confine women to the domestic sphere, Harrison suggested, these strong, public goddesses appeared to be a threat to state order, and so their powers were subsumed into new cults dedicated to male gods like Zeus and Dionysus, who reflected not only human form but also man-made hierarchies. The prominence in subsequent art and literature of the rationalized Olympian pantheon\u2014the family of gods headed by the almighty, adulterous patriarch Zeus\u2014was testament to the gradual erosion of women\u2019s importance in Greek society. What\u2019s more, it erased the experience of generations of ancient women whose religious activities had been considered essential for community survival. Harrison\u2019s books offered proof that women\u2019s subordination was not based on any \u201cnatural\u201d order but had been carefully and deliberately constructed over time. When Woolf notes in A Room of One<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Own<\/em> that \u201cuntil very recently, women in literature were the creation of men,\u201d she cites \u201cJane Harrison\u2019s books on Greek archaeology\u201d as an example of how writers are starting to \u201cwrite of women as women have never been written of before.\u201d Eileen Power, too, took inspiration from those earlier works as she researched Medieval English Nunneries<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Published in 1922, the book sets out to \u201cgive a general picture of English nunnery life\u201d in the three centuries before the Dissolution. In her introduction, Power wryly commented that plenty of books had already described the monastic ideal. Her attention was drawn not to expressions of spiritual devotion or the behavioral codes imposed by the distant ecclesiastical authorities but to the intimate workings of a human community. Drawing on sources including nuns\u2019 account books, bishops\u2019 registers, and popular songs, she reconstructs in intimate detail the material life of 138 English nunneries operating between 1270 and 1536. These were not only houses of prayer but also landlords, employers, merchants, philanthropists, and invariably experienced a \u201cconstant struggle with poverty.\u201d Often insufficiently endowed, nunneries had to build incomes through gifts and tithes, by rents from houses on their land, and by selling produce from their farms, woods, and mills. In The Corner That Held Them<\/em>, the inaugural abbess insists that her convent be granted the profits from a local mill to cover a supply of wine, the tolls from a nearby bridge to pay the priest\u2019s salary, a consignment of fox skins for coverlets, and \u201ca good relic.\u201d But their buildings were often in ruinous condition, with \u201croofs letting in rain or even tumbling about the ears of the nuns\u201d; they experienced frequent fires and floods, as well as the threat of famine and pestilence. (Beyond the danger of collapsed spires and livestock shortages, Warner adds the indignities of a plague of caterpillars, nuns leaving the convent for lovers, and a bailiff being \u201ctaken in the act of carnality with a cow.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The nunneries, Power explains, were populated almost exclusively by women from upper-class families, as an alternative to marriage. When family wealth needed to be reserved for sons or for other daughters\u2019 dowries, unlucky sisters might be sent to nunneries as a more dignified alternative to work in the fields or apprenticeship to a trade. Power writes with great sympathy of the nervous young girls who arrived at convents with no sense of religious vocation, who experienced adolescence \u201cwithin the iron bars of its unadaptable routine\u201d: \u201cEnnui, more deadly even than sensual temptation, was the devil who tormented them.\u201d No wonder, she writes, that nuns quarreled, or attempted to \u201cenliven their existence\u201d with the pet animals, clandestine silk dresses, and late-night gossiping that horrified Warner\u2019s bishop. \u201cThese nuns were very human people,\u201d she insists:<\/p>\n

No special saintliness of disposition was theirs and no miracle intervened to render them immune from tantrums when they crossed the convent threshold \u2026 They sought to spice their monotonous life, as they spiced their monotonous dishes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The originality of Medieval English Nunneries <\/em>lay not only in its subject but in its radical approach to what is worth remembering. Confined to their cloisters, most nuns barely noticed the Hundred Years\u2019 War, which happened far away; what mattered to them was the local brigands who stalked their estates, or the Black Death, which hovers maliciously over Warner\u2019s novel: \u201cIt travelled faster than a horse, it swooped like a falcon, and those whom it seized on were so suddenly corrupted that the victims, still alive and howling in anguish, stank like the dead.\u201d At the time Power was working, study of the medieval period had long been dominated by nationalists and constitutional experts, who wrote to explain and preserve prevailing systems of power, focusing on wars, dynasties, and kings, and on records that indicated deep-rooted national character. Power looked in vain for a living history that probed \u201cthe obscure lives\u201d\u2014a phrase also used by Woolf\u2014\u201cand activities of the great mass of humanity\u201d and took into account the everyday matters that affected them: the introduction of the turnip to England in 1645\u2014providing enough food to stoke the Industrial Revolution\u2014rather than the beheading of Charles I four years later; the gradual evolution of a banking and credit system rather than the building of a single glorious cathedral; the daily misery of war rather than the theoretical significance of territorial gains.<\/p>\n

Two years later, Power\u2019s second (much shorter) book, Medieval People<\/em>, became a surprise best seller, subsequently acclaimed as one of the first great works of social history. Here, Power\u2019s lens shifted to ordinary people whose lives were \u201cif less spectacular, certainly not less interesting\u201d than those of the aristocrats, criminals, or otherwise exceptional figures\u2014predominantly men\u2014whose voices have survived in the records. The book is addressed explicitly to the \u201cgeneral reader,\u201d and Power\u2019s intimate style is novelistic, her focus not on manor houses but on \u201cthe kitchens of history.\u201d Through nuanced speculation and vivid detail she fleshes out her subjects\u2014to whom she refers as \u201cour ancestors\u201d\u2014into sympathetic, complex characters, sensitive to their mundane yet defining concerns: the practical pressures of rent, diet, childcare arrangements, and travel expenses; the joy of songs or games. Several of her \u201cpeople\u201d were women. Power\u2019s imagination was not captured by the idealized ladies of chivalric romances, or by the writings of the Church or the deportment handbooks produced by the aristocracy, which could afford to \u201cregard its women as an ornamental asset.\u201d Instead, she scoured records of daily life for traces of independent, working women, and found a \u201cpractical equality\u201d prevailing among the villeins and cotters who administered their own holdings, the enterprising widows who traded as femes soles<\/em> (women without husbands), and the poor women who worked in fields to support their families, then went to church on Sunday, where \u201cpreachers told them in one breath that woman was the gate of hell and that Mary was Queen of heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the stories of these women that Power wanted to uncover\u2014the duties and preoccupations of their everyday lives, their relations with their husbands and children and the world around them\u2014as she began to make her own way as an independent woman in a world run by men. Power\u2019s interest, like Woolf\u2019s, was motivated by a strong desire to change the common conception of history as \u201cthe biographies of great men\u201d and to shatter the assumption that \u201cto speak of ordinary people [was] beneath the dignity of history.\u201d The book stands as her manifesto for what history can be: illuminating, personal, entertaining, and political. It\u2019s a rousing call for \u201cAnon\u201d to be returned to her rightful place in the record. \u201cWe still praise famous men,\u201d Power wrote,<\/p>\n

for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history; but we praise them with due recognition of the fact that not only great individuals, but people as a whole, unnamed and undistinguished masses of people, now sleeping in unknown graves, have also been concerned in the story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At a time when fascist aggression was accelerating across the globe, Power was deeply aware of the political import of work that focused on restoring marginalized voices to history\u2014and of the necessity of listening to them. After Medieval People<\/em>, her thinking took a distinctly pacifist stance, shifting from social history dwelling on personalities toward comparative, international history. Having traveled widely in China and India, she insisted that the international histories should be taught in schools \u201cso as to widen instead of to narrow sympathies,\u201d instilling in students an essential sense of community beyond their own class or nation. \u201cThe only way,\u201d she wrote, \u201cto cure the evils which have arisen out of purely national history (and to a lesser extent out of purely class solidarity) is to promote a strong sense of the solidarity of mankind as such; and how can this be better begun than by the teaching of a common history, the heritage alike of all races and all classes?\u201d She wrote textbooks; broadcast a series of lessons on the BBC; and ran campaigns for school syllabi to focus not on kings, wars, and political skirmishes, which present other countries only as enemy or ally, but on the many cooperative activities that have connected nations, such as trade, travel, art, agriculture, and religion. As the thirties progressed and a second world war looked increasingly likely, Power\u2019s response to militarist patriarchy took the form of direct action, through valiant efforts to reshape the narratives that uphold those systems of exclusion and give rise to misguided, ignorant, violent politics. She envisioned a future in which women and the lower classes would be given voice, where East would be afforded the same respect as West, and where military threats would be replaced by international cooperation in the service of peace.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think back through our mothers if we are women,\u201d wrote Woolf in A Room of One<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s Own<\/em>. Power died of a sudden heart attack in 1940, aged just fifty-one; Woolf records the death with sadness in her diary, in the midst of worries about an impending invasion and jottings on disagreements with her servants. The work of historians like Power presented Woolf, Townsend Warner, and so many others with a new, subversive model of history, which revealed the flimsy constructs on which patriarchal society rests. It gave women new mothers to think back through. By writing women back into the record, and changing the very notion of what history might look like, Power offered women not only a different past but the possibility of a different future.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Francesca<\/span>\u00a0Wade<\/span>\u00a0is the editor of\u00a0<\/em>The White Review. Her book\u00a0<\/em>Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars is published by Faber in the UK and in the U.S. by Tim Duggan Books in April.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1908,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Francesca Wade\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Francesca Wade\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Francesca Wade\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/de5bbbe9f6c312ad810502078f286076\"},\"headline\":\"A Good Convent Should Have No History\",\"datePublished\":\"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\"},\"wordCount\":2818,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Arts & Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\",\"name\":\"A Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00\",\"description\":\"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"A Good Convent Should Have No History\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/de5bbbe9f6c312ad810502078f286076\",\"name\":\"Francesca Wade\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/550fd1e20f9d350541d5f6023b356ae15b4e935df445d56d70d8c670690fe6c4?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/550fd1e20f9d350541d5f6023b356ae15b4e935df445d56d70d8c670690fe6c4?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Francesca Wade\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/fwade\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"A Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade","description":"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"A Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade","og_description":"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1000,"height":500,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Francesca Wade","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Francesca Wade","Est. reading time":"14 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/"},"author":{"name":"Francesca Wade","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/de5bbbe9f6c312ad810502078f286076"},"headline":"A Good Convent Should Have No History","datePublished":"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/"},"wordCount":2818,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg","articleSection":["Arts & Culture"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/","name":"A Good Convent Should Have No History by Francesca Wade","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg","datePublished":"2020-02-06T18:34:32+00:00","description":"February 6, 2020 \u2013 How Eileen Power\u2019s radical histories of medieval nunneries paved the way for Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nunneries.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/06\/a-good-convent-should-have-no-history\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"A Good Convent Should Have No History"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/de5bbbe9f6c312ad810502078f286076","name":"Francesca Wade","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/550fd1e20f9d350541d5f6023b356ae15b4e935df445d56d70d8c670690fe6c4?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/550fd1e20f9d350541d5f6023b356ae15b4e935df445d56d70d8c670690fe6c4?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Francesca Wade"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/fwade\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1908"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142582"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142597,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142582\/revisions\/142597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}