Cloistered

All Things Considered

Roy Jenkins talks to former nun Catherine Coldstream, who has recently published a fascinating, challenging and highly praised memoir of her former life in a Carmelite monastery.

Following the death of her father, Catherine Coldstream abandoned her musician's life in Paris and sought spiritual solace in a monastery, and found what she thought was a vocation for life as a Carmelite nun. She was only in her mid-20s Yet on a rainy night 12 years later she would try to escape from the community which had once seemed idyllic. By that time it was riven between two factions, one for maintaining the old traditions at all costs, and the other for embracing the Catholic church’s modernising concern for individual welfare.

In recent years Catherine has been a teacher of religion and ethics, and in this conversation she reflects on both the good and the bad parts of her experience in the monastery to which she gives the fictional name of 'Akenside'.