Word: conventioned
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From her first day in the convent, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) finds it harder than her sisters do to give up the natural for the spiritual life. Of her three vows-poverty, chastity, obedience-she can keep two without much difficulty, but the third is her undoing. She cannot manage to keep the silence that is required of all novices; she cannot bear to stop whatever she is doing when the bell of command is rung; she cannot persuade her thoughts from memories and objects, "the vanity of this world." Her nature rebels because her will insists on nothing less...
...medieval stones of Bruges or Brussels, the screen glows like an awakened frame of old Vermeer. Dramatically, the film has been admirably conceived and impressively executed. Religiously, it is rather shallow. There is merit in the picture's painstaking effort to convey the physical reality of convent life, but somewhere the spiritual reality is lost. The radiant pageant of devotion ravishes the senses, but it does not touch the heart...
Parental Clay. In the France of 1908 -such a well-tended garden that it was almost a crime for a child to pick a flower -the De Beauvoirs tried to maintain rather than seek status. A soso lawyer. Papa was worldly, intelligent and a gifted amateur actor. Convent-bred Mama was pious, temperamentally capricious, and terribly afraid of making a social gaffe. When the couple engaged in loud-voiced wrangles, little Simone was bitterly disillusioned; parents were not gods, but common clay. At eight, the embryo novelist wrote a woefully sentimental saga about The Misfortunes of Marguerite...
...asks to be hanged for double murder of the rag and bones man and a pimp, only to be ignored. A witch arrives, breathless from a chase over eight walls, but is nonetheless scheduled for an early a.m. burning. Alizon Eliot, a young breath of innocence fresh from the convent, comes to marry Humphrey Devise, is playfully desired by the impish younger brother Nicholas, falls in love with orphaned Richard, the Mayor's clerk, and grows into a woman by the end of act three. The witch, Jennet, also has time to bewitch Thomas Mendip, the world-weary stranger...
Lady Jackson was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Felixtowe, England, later at the Lycee Moliere and the Sorbonne, Paris, and Sommerville College, Oxford. She received her degree in "PP and E" (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). Her book titles reflect her interest; among her published works are The West at Bay (1948), Policy for the West (1951), Faith and Freedom (1954), and Interplay of East and West...