The Nun

by Denis Diderot

Russell Goulbourne (Translator)

'You can leave a forest, but you can never leave a cloister; you are free in the forest, but you are a slave in the cloister.' 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 success 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.

• ISBN10: 0192804308
• ISBN13: 9780192804303
• Publish Date: 1 July 2005 (first published 28 February 1974)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 18 February 2009
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Oxford University Press
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 234
• Language: English

Reviews

[Cameron Trost]

The tale of a girl who winds up in a convent and can't for the life of her understand what she's doing there. Diderot's exploration of the absurdity of Marie-Suzanne's predicament is by turns touching and funny, particularly when the matter of intimacy between the nun and her superior comes into play. While repetitive and stretched out in places, as was typical for eighteenth-century French prose, the ending is surprisingly rushed.