Cloistered
Catherine Coldstream
Chatto & Windus, £20, 352 pages
Charlotte Brontë’s classic bildungs-roman, Jane Eyre, tells the story of a young girl moving from a cruel adolescence to a cruel adulthood before finally settling into marriage with the man she had once rejected because God and her conscience had called her away. For years, Jane grieves deeply.
Whilst reading Catherine Coldstream’s contemplative memoir, Cloistered, I often found myself recalling the spiritual structure of Bronte’s novel as a way of understanding why it is a woman in her late 20s might commit 12 years of her life to the self-negating rules of a Carmelite nunnery.
