The work, the fictionalised ramblings of a deranged woman who ultimately died in prison, was one of the foundation texts of the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic nativist movement that convulsed America circa 1835–60. Maria described how she ran away from her convent because the reverend mother forced her to ‘live in the practice of criminal intercourse with priests’. Nuns who did not were murdered. The children born of such couplings were baptised and strangled. Maria enjoyed a brief period of respectability after her story appeared, being taken up by a committee of Protestant clergymen. But both
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