The horrors related in this narrative are so numerous as to be nearly numberless. For what a priest interprets as a cross look, a crown of thorns is pressed upon the girl’s head. She must wear it for six hours, during which time she is made to work on while the blood drips down. That’s just one horror story picked out of my notes at random. During her second escape, seeking refuge from house to house (seven to nine miles apart), she is, one can easily believe, ‘cold, hungry, almost sick, and entirely friendless.’ The storm raining down upon her head sounds like ‘the last convulsive sound of a broken heart.’ The prospect of freedom nerves her onward, however, and she, ‘a friendless wanderer,’ makes it to Vermont where she finally finds kindness and affection in a Brainard home before she is caught the second time. The punishments for that escape, including over a week of starvation, nearly kill her. She is promised, in addition, a whole year of daily punishments for this last revolt.

Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal is agonizing to hear but riveting all the way. And so it will be gotten through in short order by those who begin to listen to it, I think. The voice of Brendan Stallard, moreover, is suitably somber and soft-spoken. This woman’s horrors are so vividly told that the book left me wiped out at the end, though I was hoping for more information about the Subject’s post-Convent life. I have read many of Poe’s horror stories, like The Pit and the Pendulum and The Premature Burial. Even stories like those are less horrific than ‘the fearful outrage…upon humanity’ related by this woman. This may beg the question to some, ‘Is the story true?’ This is a disputed question that I can find no decisive answer to. In consideration of what we already know about the Roman Church for sure, it is believable enough. Because of the research into Roman Catholicism that I have already done, my belief in this story exceeds my doubt.

Doubt this is actually true. Like The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis meets Man In The Iron Mask. A Good story though it has everything. Good reading.