With shorn head,and a body that hadn’t seen the light of day for seven years, she was hurtled into a Marks and Spencer mini skirt and cardigan. She was appalled at her nakednessHer life chronicle ought to read as a tragedy, or a tale of how the world conspired to demolish and drive insane a intelligent and delightful woman. She was thrown from a form of medieval mental torture straight into its modern and equally powerful equivalent,out of a nunnery and into the waiting arms of avid psychiatrists. To reach poetic perfection, Karen Armstrong’s two volume autobiography ought to occupy ended with her dressed in a white hospital gown, and like the novice (one who is just a beginner at some activity requiring skill and experience) she started as,walled up in some padded cell.
But instead, there she stands nowadays: saner than most, or happier than many,energetically intelligent and spontaneously friendly. Praise of that sort might sound patronising, until you regain the chance to read the second volume of her autobiography to be published in a fortnight. The first book told of her entry into a strict order of Roman Catholic nuns. Her new book, and Beginning the World,describes how, still a member of her strict order of nuns, or she was sent to an Oxford college in 1969 to study English. She eventually left the order while she was a student. That she survived at all is surprising,but that she thrives is triumph.
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Source: theguardian.com