The Abbess of Crewe

The novella “The Abbess of Crux” (1974) was written hot on the heels of the “Watergate affair” and rather carefully reproduces the chain of events that became almost symbolic evidence of the crisis of bourgeois democracy. Essentially, the novella is about that crisis—but for extra comic vividness, the “Watergate” plot unfolds within the walls of a Catholic monastery. The direct target of the sharply ironic, grotesque, parodic portrayal is the everyday life and morals of a women’s monastic community cut off from the world, where everything that happens is the same—or almost the same (a difference that is sometimes invisible to Spark, but crucial to her).—as everywhere in the West: sexual revolution, a crisis of trust, estrangement between the elite and the masses, corruption and the schemes of those in power, and so on.