Celia recommends The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner:
It only takes a few pages for this book to bewilder you. The Corner that Held Them begins with Alianor de Retteville, a twelfth-century English noblewoman who is not, by any means, the novel’s heroine. Nevertheless, it is she who will set the events that follow in motion. She is, at the beginning, in bed with her adulterous lover, she is surprised by her husband, she watches as her lover is killed, she is spared, she grows old, she has children, she dies. All this occurs in the first six pages, and the procession of events is so shocking that I hesitate to even describe it. Here, look:
At the first start of waking Alianor did not move. Recumbent, stiffening in the posture of her sleep, she watched her lover being butchered. What would have been the use of moving? She could not save Giles and in a little while she would be dead herself. So she stayed as she was, her long arms and narrow hands spread out on either side as she had laid them for coolness, for the air, cooled with rain, to refresh her ribs and flanks. […] It was this immobility which saved her life. Turning to the bedside Brian de Retteville supposed that he would now kill the woman too. But seeing her lie there, so calm, so arrogantly still, his anger was arrested by the horror a man feels at a woman’s immodest individuality.
It’s a breathless passage, with all the commas scrubbed out, except for those few describing the air cooled by the rain, and Alianor, “so calm, so arrogantly still.” One reads it in a kind of stumbling, pauseless rush. And then after the moment of violence, life jerks back into motion, and within a few pages this woman we’ve just met has lived a complete, unhappy life, and is herself dead.
Because, with the murder out of the way, and having saved Alianor’s life through her own frozen indifference to her safety, the novel skips forward: Brian de Retteville will spend the next several decades taunting his wife and retelling the story of how he killed her lover to guests, and on her death, he’ll be inexplicably overcome with remorse and use her considerable fortune to found a Benedictine convent on one of her estates, called Oby. And with that, the novel hurtles forward in time, to pick up a cool hundred and fifty years later, just as the Black Death is making ground in England, and the convent at Oby is infected. This little moment of death, too, will pass, leaving its survivors to face other societal convulsions, a few months or a few decades in the future.
Alianor is, largely, forgotten by the community in whose honor she was founded. But those jarring first pages—and the question of “immodest individuality”—will be the cornerstone for what comes after. What Warner is most interested in is not the individual, but the life of an institution. The Oby convent is a community carved out of the church and the law’s general hostility towards women, not quite self-directed, but often without oversight, and the question of faith in the convent is always mixed with the question of independence: will the next Bishop keep the nuns on a shorter leash, will they be able to decide their own affairs, and will they have the money to do so?
When the Black Death strikes the convent, Warner sums up the situation like this: “the extravaganza of death that was sweeping their world away suggested no changes to them except the change from being alive to being dead.” Still the rents must be collected, noble legacies secured, the convent’s food and beer and cloth purchased, the chapel renovated and the priest’s salary paid. Often this must be done in opposition to the church hierarchy, which, as a rule, would like to place the nuns under stricter scrutiny and a tighter budget. While the nuns are pulling their daily living by inches out of the jaws of death, the ground is changing under them. Soon there may be no workmen, no farmers to pay the rent, no priest to take confession or deliver the last rites.
Personal faith, in this world, is both mandated and met with deep suspicion and hostility. Spiritual knowledge is one of the few avenues of power that can, theoretically, spring up in women as well as in men, among the poor as easily as the rich. And so, naturally, the structures of church and government want to be certain that the wisdom of God isn’t being unreasonably or inconveniently distributed, despite the advent of the plague that has turned the world upside down. One recurring motif in The Corner that Held Them is the knowledge and power of the outcast: the bastard clerk who, almost accidentally, claims the title of priest, from which he is excluded by his illegitimate birth, the ostracized nun who receives a vision from Saint Leonard instructing her to go and become an anchoress, the man appointed custodian of the convent, who finds unexpected beauty and grace in a visit to a leper colony.
It is the task of power to mediate (and disarm) these individual experiences of truth and beauty. When, for instance, the local bishop comes to evaluate the nun Lilias’s request to become an anchoress, he hears her story of being struck down at prayer by Saint Leonard and responds thus:
He told her of his sister, a nun at Barking, who had twice been addressed by heavenly voices. On the first occasion the voice warned her that the tap of a wine-cask had not been properly turned off, so that the wine was wasting. On the second occasion, when his sister had cracked a nut and found nothing inside it but dust and a fat white grub, a voice had rebuked her disappointment by exclaiming, “You should thank God for this picture of a good nun!”
The implied message is clear: it is not for a nun to seek spiritual insight, but to tend to the earthly tasks required to keep the convent running, and to not complain when she is served worms instead of nuts. The novel’s long view of history is frequently extremely funny, as with the madcap idea of angels descending from heaven to bully a nun for being sad about a walnut, but there’s a tyranny underlying the humor. To wit: it’s nearly impossible to find meaning in a world that is so relentlessly hostile to individual experience.
The tone of farce that the novel frequently adopts has a dark edge. History will wipe these women and all that they accomplish entirely from memory. It’s not quite a tragedy when the convent loses its altar vessels, or the old priest loses his mind, or the chaplain of lepers loses his house, because these things are common occurrences in the flow of the years. The final sum of all of these losses is a kind of winsome and rueful comedy. So the community mostly bumbles along, with everyone doing the tasks they’ve been assigned, and the small dissatisfactions that they feel are mostly quiet ones. Heavenly ecstasy and the terror of hell are, for the most part, private experiences, like bubbles in a piece of blown glass. If you crack the glass to get at them, they evaporate, and the vessel itself breaks. Warner handles her years delicately, but sometimes she lets some small catastrophe slip in, so that you look at the jagged edge of a day and ask, Is this what it was? Yes.