Get Thee to a Nunnery

The Corner That Held Them
Sylvia Townsend Warner

Naturally I wasn't expecting Jack Reacher-style action when I picked up this 399-page 1948 novel about three decades in the life and times of a humble 14th-Century English convent. And indeed, it is one of those books in which not much happens, at least for considerable stretches. There is a backdrop of big events, beginning with the Black Death, but poverty, sickness, and death were everyday features of life during those times and are treated without much drama. Nuns arrive and usually remain until their own deaths; each in a sequence of prioresses is more or less competent or unpopular than the last; over the course of the novel the convent finds itself under the more or less disinterested rule of three different bishops. After about 200 somewhat soporific pages I confess I nearly threw in the towel, but the exceptional quality of the writing and the sheer trueness of the storytelling kept me going; the second half of the book picks up narrative steam and is, in places, deeply moving. It is, in retrospect, a splendid book.

Perhaps unexpectedly in a novel by a feminist woman about a community of women, with a few exceptions The Corner That Held Them does not develop the characters of the individual nuns in much depth or subtlety– they often appear in pairs or as a gaggle. Indeed it is Warner's goal to portray the history of a community, not individuals. The most vividly drawn character is the steadiest presence through nearly the entire narrative arc: Sir Ralph Kello, the (supposed) convent priest. A dreamer and scholar and a bit of a fool, he is both an outside observer and intimate participant in the affairs of the convent.

There is no conventionally linear plot, although the book is rigorously chronological. Rather, Warner presents a sequence of vignettes centered on the convent, but with much of the drama provided by a series of short journeys a few days' ride away, by one character or another.

It did not surprise me to learn that Warner, in addition to being a novelist, feminist, and scholar of early music, was also a committed Marxist. If it is possible to write a historical materialist novel, this is surely it. Much attention is paid to the economic context of the convent, its finances and management– in a word, money. As an institution, the convent relied for revenue on its claims over streams of income from various endowments, assets, and modest landholdings, which might come as a dowry when a family committed a daughter to enter the convent as a novice. These sources of income were unsteady, and could be at the mercy of the granting family. When a nun died, did the revenue from her endowment continue, or revert to her family? Did her wishes in this respect carry any weight? There was also borrowing: one plot element even revolves around the prospect of consolidating and refinancing the convent's debt.

As any economic historian knows, the Black Death ushered in a period of high wages for the working class, as labor supply collapsed. But institutions reliant on rents found these to be harder times– the standard Ricardian logic dictated declining rents as the land-labor ratio rose. Such problems hit home for the prioress and her treasuress. Nunneries were also subject to oversight by the Church, with its interests both financial and theological. A meddling visitation by the new bishop Walter yields a scathing accreditation report and the imposition of a custos, the bishop's man, to keep tabs on the place. Thankfully, the appointed custos Henry Yellowlees is not a fan of the new bishop and not eager to make too much trouble for the nuns.

As a materialist, Warner has no truck with miracles or the reality of the spirit domain, but she is respectful of religious experience, even when she has her fun with it. And the book is consistently funny, in its understated ironic fashion. It also finds beauty in the most unlikely places, for example when Henry journeys off to Esselby on behalf of the nuns, aiming to collect rent in arrears from one of the convent's holdings. En route he stays a night at a leper-house, where the chaplain happens to be a devotee of the Ars nova and enlists Henry to sing a kyrie of Machault, the third part sung by a leper, who is kept at a safe distance at the further end of the room.

... And as paradise is made for man, this music seemed made for man's singing; not for edification, or the working-out of an argument, or the display of skill, but only for ease and pleasure, as in paradise where the abolition of sin begets a pagan carelessness, where the certainty of Christ's countenance frees men's souls from the obligations of christian behaviour, the creaking counterpoint of God's law and man's obedience.  

It ended. Henry Yellowlees raised his eyes from the music-book. The rays of the levelling sun had shifted while they sang and now shone full on the leper. His face, his high bald head, were scarlet. He seemed to be on fire. 

'Again! Let us sing it again!'

This epiphany has a profound effect on Henry. Alas, not all goes well for the chaplain and his lepers. The convent, however, endures, at least to March 1382, when the story does not exactly end, but stops.