La Religieuse Reading Order

La Religieuse (The Nun, written c.1780, published posthumously 1796) by Denis Diderot is one of the most disturbing novels in the French tradition — a first-person narrative in the form of a memoir by Suzanne Simonin, a young woman forced into a convent against her will and subjected to escalating abuse by a series of superior figures. The novel began as a hoax: Diderot and his friends wrote a series of letters in Suzanne's name to their friend the Marquis de Croismare, trying to lure him back to Paris on a false humanitarian mission. When Croismare eventually realized the deception, Diderot expanded the letters into a novel. La Religieuse is formally remarkable for its sustained first-person voice: Suzanne is an entirely unreliable narrator not because she lies, but because she genuinely does not understand the nature of the situations she describes — she describes her first superior's apparent kindness, her second superior's sadistic abuse, and her third superior's erotic obsession without understanding any of them, and the reader must interpret what she cannot. The novel is a devastating attack on the institution of forced vows and on the convent as a system for disposing of unwanted daughters, and it is also one of the earliest studies in French fiction of a consciousness shaped entirely by a system it cannot see outside of.