The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

A good convent should have no history. Its life is hid with Christ who is above. History is of the world, costly and deadly, and the events it records are usually deplorable: the year when the roof caught fire, the year of the summer flood which swept away the haystacks and drowned the bailiff, the year when the cattle were stolen, the year when the king laid the great impost for the Scotch wars and timber for five years had to be felled to pay it, the year of the pestilence, the year when Dame Dionysia had a baby by the bishop's clerk. Yet the events of history carry a certain exhilaration with them. Decisions are made, money is spent, strangers arrive, familiar characters appear in a new light, transfigured with unexpected goodness or badness. Few calamities fall on a religious house which are not at some time or other looked back upon with wistful regret.

There is nothing much remarkable about the convent of Oby. Tucked away in a corner of the English fens, the nuns of Oby toil at their psalters and their embroidery. The convent is sometimes rich and sometimes poor, sometimes smiled upon by the overseeing Bishop and sometimes deplored; the nuns are respected and treasured by many of their neighbors and hated by others, sometimes the nuns themselves live harmoniously and sometimes the rule is resentment. A passerby might not even know it's there, at least until its spire is built at last, a project that takes decades and heaps of money, foiled once by a complete and deadly collapse. (If you ask me, Sylvia Townsend Warner's account of the raising of a spire is much more convincing and engaging than William Golding's novel The Spire, substituting as it does a kind of clear-eyed realism for Golding's high-pitched Freudian drama.)

The Corner That Held Them describes thirty years in the life of the Oby convent, beginning in the 1350's with the outbreak of the Black Death. As nuns come and go, so do the characters of the novel: entering as novices or dying, or simply appearing or vanishing in the way that real people sometimes do in the life of an institution. By 1380, the cast of characters has turned over almost completely, with the exception of Sir Ralph, the convent's resident priest, who keeps for many decades a horrible secret: he isn't really a priest. Nuns drift in and out of the novel's focus: tedious Dame Johanna, kindly Dame Isabel, melancholy Dame Lilias, shrewd Dame Lovisa, simple Dame Adela. Their individual stories are touching or heartbreaking, and well-crafted, but together they complete an image in the life of a community. As one of several prioresses thinks to herself:

And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.

Though well-steeped in both Biblical knowledge and the religious life of the 14th century, The Corner That Held Them is not very interested in matters of the spirit. It is money, rather, that is at the heart of he novel: how it is made, how it is kept, how it is spent. How can the convent collect the tithes of the parsonages that fall under its purview? How pay for the materials to build a spire, or mend clothes, or plant vegetables? As the Black Death fades from view, another threat emerges: violent Lollards who resent the church's hoarding of wealth. At one point the nuns, fearing an invasion, have their gold and silver buried by their bailiff--who is killed before he can tell them where he's buried it. And though individual nuns have their consciences pricked time and time again--Lilias dreams of becoming an anchoress, Adela steals the embroidery to sell for the poor--the convent as a whole moves on stolidly, too caught up in economic contingencies to tend to something as poor as souls.

I'm impressed by the wonderful range of Townsend Warner's novels; the convent of Oby seems--and is--miles and years away from the Polynesian missionary of Mr. Fortune. Even that novel's thematic focus on the nature of belief seems foreign to The Corner That Held Them, a novel in which belief seems secondary to the price of potatoes. Yet both novels share an interest in how strong ties are made and broken between people: "There can hardly be intimacy in the cloister," the prioress thinks, "before intimacy can be engendered there must be freedom, the option to approach or move away."