we're only ashes.

Like several other people on my reading list, including osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars!

Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.

Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.

Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?