Convent: A Novel

Audrey Thorney entered the Rosaline convent in 1960, a year recognized as a watershed by historians of women's religious life in America. The postwar vocation surge was at its peak, and the exodus in which two of every three nuns would leave their convents still lay ahead. As Sister Emmanuel, she was under the direction of a novice mistress considered harsh even by the standards of the era. After two-and-a-half years in Sister Wulfram's novitiate, Sister Emmanuel was sent to a college for nuns and then was assigned to teach in her order's schools. As the Catholic Church in general was experiencing the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council, and as women's communities in particular were adjusting to the ideas introduced by the Sister Formation movement and by Cardinal Suenens, Sister Emmanuel was dealing with troubled fellow religious and with priests beset by personal problems and openly contemptuous of nuns.