On April 14, I will be hosting an 18+ online salon about Diderot’s scandalous novel The Nun. Starting at 8:30 ET.
Written in the 1760s but published only after Diderot’s death, The Nun is a crowd-shocking Enlightenment novel masquerading as a personal confession.
It tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, a young woman forced into convent life against her will, and through her eyes reveals the cruelty that religious institutions can hide.
Diderot asks the timely, troubling question: what does goodness mean inside a system that takes away your freedom?
Raymond Trousson — Belgian literary historian of the French Enlightenment — argued that in The Nun “Diderot succeeded in making his heroine not the embodiment of an idea, but a touching and pathetic character, even if her innocence and ignorance, necessary to the narrative, do not always convince.”
