num_pages: 234
description: Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. A succès de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance.This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.
language: English
title: The Nun
titlecomplete: The Nun
characters: Sister Ursule, Father Lemoine, Sister Thérèse, Dom Morel, Suzanne Simonin, Mother de Moni, Monsieur Manouri, Sister Sainte-Christine
genres: Religion, Philosophy, French Literature, Novels, School, 18th Century, Literature, Classics, Fiction, France
ratings_count: 7165
places: France
publisher: Oxford University Press