Reviewed by Harriet
In my mind I am still running. Running towards the road. Running, running, running. The darkness is fresh around me, the air slicing across my face in wild, clean streaks.
So begins Catherine Coldstream’s fascinating, often disturbing, memoir of her life as a Carmelite nun. Her reason for this need to escape, ten years after her decision to enter a strict Carmelite monastery, will become more than clear as the book progresses. But first she goes back to her reasons for entering the monastery at the age of twenty-seven. Nothing in her background and upbringing would have suggested such a choice: the daughter of a celebrated painter and art college head, she had grown up in a bohemian household, with a mother who was increasingly absent, and had lived a predictably free life, with boyfriends, art and travel. But her father. died when she was twenty-four, and seeing his body in the hospital two days later she had experienced ‘a moment not only of shock but also of heightened awareness’. His body was vacant but she had sensed his embodied spirit still around her. ‘Overnight…I had become a believer in the afterlife’. Her only previous brush with things spiritual had been her occasional singing in an Anglo-Catholic church choir in Paris, but now, after much reading and exploring retreats, she converted to Roman Catholicism and chose to join a Carmelite monastery in Northumberland.
The Carmelites are the strictest of all orders. They isolate themselves completely from the outside world, spending their days in prayer, speaking only in necessary situations and only communicating with outsiders through a grille. At first, though she had to adjust to the strangeness of her new life, Catherine welcomed the discipline and peace, and came to love the beauty of the surrounding natural world, ‘The summers unspooled, bright with birdsong, the fields…’. The strictness of the order meant that making friends was not allowed, intellectual pursuits were discouraged, and you should never, ever, say what is on your mind. But in her early days there Catherine relished the silence and the discipline, and was transported by the singing, ‘which seemed to carry my voice weightlessly, as though transposed by transcendent light’. She was drawn to Mother Julianne, the long-time Mother Superior, ‘a huge and venerable woman’, and felt comfortable and safe with her in charge. But Mother Julianne was very old, and after her passing things changed dramatically. When her successor took over, the monastery started to resemble a cult. The ‘gang’ who surrounded the new Mother Superior treated those out of favour with extreme cruelty, literally forcing them to kneel and beg forgiveness if they were thought to step out of line. Some of the younger nuns developed psychiatric problems, but when one of them had a fit on the floor of the chapel, she was resolutely ignored by the rest of the nuns. And in a distressing scene Catherine, who was everything the Mother Superior despised – a convert rather than a born Catholic, a Southerner with a posh accent and a love of books and learning – was dragged out of the infirmary and beaten.
No wonder, you might think, that Catherine ran away. So it’s a surprise to learn that she returned for two years before making the final decision to leave. And perhaps also a surprise that although she abandoned monastic life, she remained a believer, although one without a formal relationship to the church. She went on to study theology at Oxford University, married, and is now teaching at the university.
If you wondered if this book was designed to put you off Christianity, I suppose it might well do that. But what it really does is to show the dangers of a small community of fallible human beings of any persuasion being thrown together in an enclosed space. The stories told here have parallels in boarding-school life, and prison life, and of course in the many cults whose followers have sometimes been made undergo extreme suffering. If you think a believer like Catherine is deluded, this won’t change your mind. But I was left admiring her for her survival and for her continued certainty that there’s a spiritual element to human life that can be accessed by someone who has what used to be called a calling. Beautifully written and eminently readable.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.
Catherine Coldstream, Cloistered: My Years as a Nun (Vintage, 2025). 978-1529931518, 352pp., paperback.
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Good review. I want to read this.