MARIA MONK ;

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5, 1 February 1900, Page 3

MARIA MONK ;

MARGARET SHEPHERD , MRS. SLATTERY.

.!. Another indispensable requisite in the ' escaped nun 'trade is a good, round, lying tale of phenomenal immorality. To succeed, it must, above all, be a prurient or filthy one. In practically every instance it is, as in the case of Maria Monk, concocted by the male partner in the ' venture.' Thus, an affidavit of Slattery's nephew and assistant attributes the authorship of Mrs. Slattery's lectures to the ex-priest ; and there is internal evidence to show that considerable portions of her publications — and especially the doctrinal clap-trap, the prefaces to her Convent Life, etc. — are his work. Attempts have been made by enterprising male speculators to exploit even those very rare specimens of genuine ex-nuns that have at long intervals left their convents. This Miss Cusack tells us with sufficient plainness in a letter written to the Honrnemouth Obsrrrt r of November S, IS'.W, in condemnation of the falsehoods of Ellen Golding. Referring to a disreputable, though well-dressed, ..•lass ot bigots who organise, arrange, and support filthy and lying crusades of the Slattery kind, she says :—: —

• If I were to tell something of what I have been made to suffer by persons of this class, professing to be Christians, because I could neither make statements which I knew to be false, nor endorse statements made by others which I doubted, Miss Golding's case would, perhaps, be better understood.'

In plain terms, those anti-convent fables are still — as was the ease with the Maria Monk imposture— concocted by designing niijnu Ktrios. and are. alter a course of preparation, recited in public by the genuine ex-nun or, more frequently, by her bogus counterfeit. L'dith O'Gorman and Ellen Goldmg allowed themselves to be exploited in this way. The ' ventures ' prospered till the publication and persistent circulation of Father Sydney Smith's and Mr. Britten's pamphlets and the investigations to which they led. Then the gaudy bubbles burst. Sharu nuns defy exposure other than that of the police and criminal courts, and keep- on the boards' till their audiences melt away. But Edith O'Gorman and Ellen Gokling had sufficient sense ot shame left to hide their diminished heads in the friendly obscurity of private life. They were the first, the only, and the last representatives of the genuine lecturing ex-nun.