How literature loves to corral its characters in defined, even confined spaces and closed societies. Chaucer anatomised his ‘sondry folk’, his pilgrims, as they gathered in Southwerk’s Tabard Inn. A secluded Florentine villa was Boccaccio’s retreat for storytelling, while the Black Death raged in the countryside. Agatha Christie, who understood immurement-by-loss, lent a lethal frisson to the English country house and the European rail carriage. Umberto Eco chose a monastery for his Name of the Rose intrigue. As recently as 2023, Charlotte Wood brought the protagonist of her novel Stone Yard Devotional into a convent, to confront herself and witness another portentous environmental and social plague – this one of mice.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99 pb, 266 pp
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