Monica Baldwin

Monica Baldwin (22 February 1893 – 17 November 1975) was a British writer. She spent the first half of her adult life as a Catholic nun, and is notable for the memoir she wrote after leaving her enclosed religious order.

Biography Baldwin was born in Stourport, Worcestershire, England to Edward Arthur Baldwin and Lucilla Baldwin Livesey. Her great-grandfather was George Pearce Baldwin, grandfather of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Baldwin joined an enclosed religious order of Augustinian canonesses in 1914, a few months before the beginning of World War I. Ten years later she began to think she had made a mistake but it was another 18 years before she left, convinced that she "was no more fitted to be a nun than to be an acrobat."

Work and writing Among her jobs outside were as a gardener in the Women's Land Army, as a matron in a camp for conscripted young women working in munitions factories, and as an army canteen hostess peeling potatoes. Once a photographer offered her a job developing "dirty pictures" in his cellar. is a memoir of some of the contrasts between life in an enclosed convent and life out in the contemporary world. Baldwin relates how she could not recall reading a newspaper during the entire course of the First World War. When she entered, the popular use of telephones, cinema and radio were in their infancy; when she left they were common in England.

Her novel, The Called and the Chosen, written as the diary of Sister Ursula Auberon, an enclosed nun at the Abbaye de la Sainte Croix, Framleghen, was published in 1957 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. The book followed the 1956 publication of The Nun's Story, a novel by Kathryn Hulme, partly based on the experiences of her companion Marie Louise Habets, who left the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary. In 1965, Baldwin published her second autobiographical book, called Goose in the Jungle. A Flight Round the World with Digressions.

Personal life In the 1960s Baldwin lived on Alderney in the Channel Islands. Later, she lived at a religious retirement home near Bury St. Edmunds. She died in 1975 and is buried in Clare, Suffolk.