Convent Girl

(price-clipped) [book itself is virtually as new, with no discernible wear; jacket similarly nice, with just a couple of tiny closed tears at top edge (one at top of front panel, the other at top rear flap-fold), and an unobtrusive surface-scrape near the bottom of the front panel]. "In this book the convent is stripped of the mystery that has so long made it seem an unapproachable and slightly fabulous institution. The author writes from a personal angle, giving the record of a normal little girl's dismay at the strangeness and discipline, of the effect of all the dogma and training on her imagination, of the undercurrent of fear and emotion flowing through the convent life." The author, who (surprise!) spent part of her own girlhood in a convent school, was a Greenwich Village poet who hit it temporarily big in 1929, when Harper & Brothers, to whom she was introduced by none other than Thornton Wilder, published both this, her only novel, and "Earthbound," her first book of poetry; another book of poetry, "Balm of Gilead," appeared the next year. (That was it, though, until she next made the news when she was run down by a car when she was jaywalking in NYC; she survived (just barely), continued to write poetry, and lived to the age of 92. Although well-received by secular critics, who were particularly impressed by its clear-eyed rendering of a child's point of view, "Convent Girl" was attacked by the Catholic press, with one influential critic denouncing it as a thinly-veiled hatchet job on the church: No guns were used, no daggers, no yelling, no blood, no strangulations, nothing like that. They were all smothered to death with a powder puff. A womans job and a good one.

Product Info

Publisher: Harper & Brothers

Year: 1929

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

Seller Info

ReadInk

Address: 2261 West 21st St. Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.readinkbooks.com

Country: United States