In This House of Brede
New York: The Viking Press, 1969. Octavo, original sage green cloth with small book club slug, spine lettered in brown, cartographic endpapers, original pictorial dust jacket. Faint toning to price-clipped dust jacket. A near-fine copy. Item #1800
"WHAT DO YOU ASK? TO TRY MY VOCATION AS A BENEDICTINE NUN IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE"
Early American edition of In This House of Brede—Rumer Godden's beloved novel of English Benedictine nuns. This Book Club Edition, designed for Viking Press by S.A. Summit with a pictorial dust jacket, was published in the same year as the first British edition,
In This House of Brede is a meditation on the idea of time, juxtaposing temporality with eternity ("Nuns don't need clocks. We have bells"). For Philippa Talbot and the nuns of Brede Abbey, "conversing with God in private and through common liturgy is the main priority—Brede is described as a 'power house of prayer'—and, as the narrative explains, the nuns 'different avocations [are] twined with the seasons of prayer.' This focus on prayer makes spiritual and liturgical events the most solid way of charting the passage of time for the nuns of Brede, and Philippa, for instance, reflects upon life as a kind of liturgical wheel, Advent to Advent, spun continuously’’ (Marisa Pierson).
"When Godden—who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957—was first becoming interested in the Catholic faith, she sent a prayer request to the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey and later visited in person; she was greeted by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, who became a friend and spiritual advisor to Godden. In one of their conversations, Dame Felicitas said that she wished ‘‘someone would write a book about nuns as they really are, not as the author wants them to be,’’ and Godden—remembering Black Narcissus, a novel she had published in 1939 about Anglican nuns—felt ashamed of the way she herself had previously written of the religious life" (Marisa Pierson).
The author's prefatory note credits "Dame Laurentia McLachlan and Sister Mary Ann McArdle of Stanbrook Abbey. To many monasteries of Benedictine nuns, I owe most grateful thanks; especially do I offer them to our English abbeys of Stanbrook, Talacre, and Ryde."
Preceded by a chart of the Benedictines of Brede ("When Philippa Talbot entered"), the text concludes with a short collection of Notes on the religious life ("Why a Monastery for Nuns?"). The pictorial dust jacket features a rear panel blurb from Orville Prescott's review praising the novel's "intimate authority and brilliant writing." Marisa Pierson. Vocation and time in Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede. Christianity and Literature, Vol. 65, No. 1 (December 2015).
Price: $100.00