Odds & Ends.

After reading Mark Salzman's impressive book, Lying Awake, I wrote my February 2001 column on novels that center on convent life. One of the odd things about all the novels I then mentioned was that not one of them was written by a sister. I described the authors of these novels--the majority male--as all over hell's half acre. I thought that was the end of it.

Then I received an e-mail from Irene Mahoney, who suggested I look at her book An Accidental Grace, an out-of-print novel about convent life. The lead character, a woman who leaves the convent to care for her ailing father, now rejoins in midlife. All has changed. The search for a viable future for this disparate and--at times, desperate--group of religious women brings out both the best and worst in this novel's many intriguing characters.

Sister Mahoney is a member of the Ursuline order. Finally a religious sister who has authored a novel on convent life! No stranger to writing, she most recently wrote a history of the Ursuline Chinese Province titled Swatow and edited A Company of Women, a book of essays centering on vocation. She published her first book in 1964, Marie of the Incarnation, a biography of the French Ursuline who in 1639 established a convent in Quebec. That book led to other biographies, Royal Cousin on the life of Henri IV of France and Madame Catherine about Catherine de Medici.

Mahoney wrote An Accidental Grace in 1977, her first book of fiction published under her own name (she previously wrote a mystery novel, Seven Sons, "just for fun" published under the nom de plume, Angela Simon). When she had been working in the Scholar's Room at the New York Public Library on the Medici biography, she met other authors: Susan Brownmiller, working on Against Our Will; Bob Caro, finishing up The Power Broker; Joe Lash, doing his Roosevelt books; and Nancy Milford, researching Edna St. Vincent Millay. "It was a terrific place to work. We had lunch together and socialized after hours," recalls Mahoney. "Anything to do with religion was dumped on me; I was to explain all." Her novel grew out of this experience.

After college, Mahoney worked for the publisher Prentice-Hall prior to becoming an Ursuline. Before entering the convent, she tore up everything she had written. "Probably a good thing; it was no doubt quite awful," she now claims. She taught at the College of New Rochelle and in 1980 went to Taiwan to teach for a few years, the beginning of her love affair with China, which lasts to this day.

In the 1980s, Mahoney teamed up with English actress Roberta Nobleman for All That I Am, a theater piece featuring a series of monologues by women attached to famous churchmen, such as Peter's wife and Augustine's mistress. The church-reform group Call to Action has sponsored more than 100 productions of this show.

Two unpublished novels grace Mahoney's closet: Solo Voices and A Dream of Distant Mountains. Although her agent thinks that Solo Voices is her best work, it has yet to see the published light of day. The other novel, set in her beloved China, still needs more work, says its author.

Had I encountered Mahoney as a character in a work of fiction, I might have wondered if an author's imagination wasn't just a little overactive. But no, this is real life. I'm glad she took the time to write and tell me about An Accidental Grace.

Readers, search local libraries and scour used book stores to find this gem of a novel. Good hunting. Publishers, what are you waiting for? We want to read Solo Voices.

PETER GILMOUR (Pgilmou@wpo. it. luc. edu) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.