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I LEAP OVER THE WALL: Contrasts and Impressions after Twenty-eight Years in a Convent by Monica Baldwin

I LEAP OVER THE WALL: Contrasts and Impressions after Twenty-eight Years in a Convent

By

Pub Date: Jan. 26th, 1949

This is a fascinating book. It is not as sensational as the title is no expose of life among the Nuns. But here is the record of the experience English woman (a relative of Stanley Baldwin) who voluntarily took the veil twenty-eight years forsook the convent and its life. She did so with no ill is she still firm in her Catholic faith, but most appreciative of the val monastic life. Why then did she leave it? The author gives her own explanati felt she was a square peg in a round hole; that the monastic life did not repr will for her and that she entered it out of essentially selfish motives. But in the book other reasons chief of which was her desire for personal freedom; to order her own life, make her own choices and be surrounded by things that and by friends of her own choosing. Her adjustment to life outside convent ficult, and her description of the problems involved intensely interesting. experience reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle. To accustom herself to the changes taken place in the past twenty-eight years, changes in customs and costumes, a political and economic life required all the fortitude and the sense of humor author possesses. This part of the story is intermingled by way of contrast tailed description of convent life. The author does not idealize the monastic does Thomas Norton. But neither has she come out a violent critic of it. Rat a sympathetic interpretation of its value the while she expresses for certain asterisitics of it the profound distaste which finally led her to ""leap over This book ought to have a wide reading both by Catholics and non-Catholics, matter is interesting, and is presented in an extremely able fashion.