As the film Philomena heads into awards season, draped with nominations for Oscars and Baftas, you might think nuns are having a bad PR moment. But then over at Team Convent, Call the Midwife is the star of BBC TV's Sunday nights with a much more sympathetic crew. Both these are fictionalised versions of real stories, and they are just the tip of the iceberg: there are large numbers of nuns in books – surely higher than their incidence in the real-life population – with nearly all the descriptions coming from women authors, though there are a few good men below. (Strangely, I made the same point about flat-sharing in books – is it something to do with women and single-sex groups?).
Muriel Spark liked her nuns – one of the main characters in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ends up as Sister Helena, and there is a Marxist Church of England convent in Symposium: in one splendid scene the haloes on the figures in a mural are revealed as the fur hats of Lenin and friends. The Abbess of Crewe is wholly set in a convent, but is well known to be a satire on the Watergate scandal.
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