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In 1989, when many of her generation were attending raves, studying, forging careers, travelling, getting married — the stuff of supposedly “normal” life — Catherine Coldstream entered a Carmelite order of nuns in rural Northumbria.
It was an unusual step for the previously irreligious daughter of a prominent British realist painter — Sir William Coldstream — and totally antithetical to her background growing up in agnostic “bohemian” north London as one of three children from her father’s late second marriage.
It was the death of William Coldstream, when she was 24, that would set the grieving Catherine, a burgeoning musician, on the path first of conversion to Catholicism and then eventually to dedicate her life to God by taking a vow of silence in a closed, contemplative order.
Cloistered, Coldstream’s account of the 12 years she spent at Akenside Priory (names and places are pseudonymised) is a worthy addition to the bibliography of nun lit. Its most obvious comparison is Through the Narrow Gate, historian Karen Armstrong’s bestselling 1981 memoir of her time as a teenage nun in the 1960s; and in fiction the theme of the female religious recluse has featured in novels from Antonia White’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age Frost in May (1933) to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them (1948) and more recently Lauren Groff’s Matrix (2021) and Victoria MacKenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain (2023).
Renunciation of the world and its subsequent teachings has been big business since the Middle Ages, when Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe became bywords for asceticism. That their literature abides today proves that the fascination with abstention endures.
Coldstream was a mature if impressionable adult when she joined her order. She writes lyrically, precisely and at times rapturously of her early days there, first a guest, then a postulant, novitiate and finally fully fledged sister, when her hair is ceremonially cut off and her white veil replaced with a black one.
Despite not being a “Cradle Catholic” (one of many issues with which she contends as the years pass), it is not necessarily loss of religious faith that will lead to Coldstream’s dramatic departure from monastic life at the dawn of the new millennium.
As she describes it, the initial pull towards Akenside is one of bereavement and belonging. The eldest of the “second eleven” of her father’s children, Coldstream found herself stuck between two factions as her parents’ marriage unravelled.
When the “inconceivable” happened and her elderly father died, her already distant mother moved away, as did her siblings: their family home was sold. Coldstream was desperate for roots of a different kind. Deliberately, she chose a “radical” way — instead of a modernised order, one of silence and seclusion.
The anchorite as a subject has appealed and intrigued for centuries. Why not surrender worldliness when, culturally and socially, the only other options were marriage, degradation and poverty? But what did it mean to be a nun in the late 20th century? At Akenside the intelligent, sensitive Coldstream has to learn penitence, humility and not to question “the Life”.
Music sustains her in place of proper food or human comfort — the chapel soars with song during the prescribed canonical hours; the solitary ecstasy of her cell is a refuge until it becomes a prison. She writes stunningly of the natural world as the intellectual and material one fades: “The sky scudded. The sun peeped through like a benediction.”
Yet all is not serene. Entering the order at the same time as her “twin” — an unstable young woman from a long-established local Catholic family — Coldstream finds that, in a community where all are supposedly equal before God, there is still favouritism and she is the one who is shunned. And, as with any insular institution, divisions and unease proliferate.
The dwindling population of monastic orders in general and the “better offers” from less restrictive priories are a constant source of concern to Akenside’s inhabitants.
As the absorbing, increasingly disturbing narrative progresses rather like a thriller, the consuming cult of personality around the order’s prioress (her unrestrained love of cats leads to a feral infestation) and the disregard for Carmelite strictures reach a crisis when another order merges with Akenside.
The ensuing schism becomes horribly personal and destructive, with Coldstream, just as she was with her parents, caught in the crossfire.
Cloistered is an intense and often theatrical read. It comes as something of a relief to leave its pages, beautifully written as they are.
When Coldstream finally makes the break, enrolling at university, taking up music again and replacing a spiritual spouse with a corporeal one, her freedom is laced with wistfulness. Years after, the yearning for withdrawal, of being “enamoured” by it, remains.
Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream Chatto & Windus £20, 352 pages
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