Sacred Hearts [Hardcover]

Sarah Dunant's latest novel is set in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. The year is 1570. The story revolves around two women who had entered holy orders for different reasons. Serafina is a hot-headed 16-year old who had fallen in love with a man who was not her authoritarian father's choice as her husband, consequently she was condemned by him to spend the rest of her life as a nun. Zuana is in her thirties, the scholarly only child of a doctor who died suddenly and, with no prospects of marriage, was forced to enter the convent because she saw no other option. Both Serafina and Zuana struggle to adapt to the rigid lifestyle, and their triumphs and defeats are vividly portrayed. Sacred Hearts is patently a feminist novel, which compares the 16th century societal attitudes to women with those which prevail today. It is a very absorbing story, thought-provoking, sometimes horrifying, and very claustrophobic (all the action takes place within the convent walls). Whereas Sarah Dunant's earlier novel the Birth of Venus, also set in Italy, merely touched on the expression of feminine instincts, this one goes one step further, introducing betrayal and intrigue into a closed community where strong women can exercise real power, whereas in the outside world they had no power at all. The author brings her characters so vividly to life the reader has the impression of actually being in the convent with them. Five stars all the way.

I was gripped from the moment I picked the book up and saw the ominous Historical Note - "By the second half of the sixteenth century, the price of wedding dowries had risen so sharply in Catholic Europe that most noble families could not afford to marry off more than one daughter. The remaining young women were dispatched - at a much lesser price - to convents...Not all of them went willingly."

Serafina is sixteen years old and faces a lifetime of incarceration as the result of a forbidden flirtation discovered by her father. It is 1570 in the Italian city of Ferrara; the cultural flowering of the Renaissance is at its zenith, epressed in the glorious musical compositions flowing from the local nunnery, where her beautiful voice makes her a desirable commodity.

But Serafina has been locked up against her will. Furious, desperate, defiant and more than a little hysterical, she refuses to sing and is determined to escape. Hoping to diffuse the situation, and all too aware of the unsettling effect that a febrile novice can have on an enclosed community, the politically adept Abbess places her alongside another misfit, Suora Zuana. Raised by a remarkably open-minded physician father, Zuana entered the convent seventeen years ago after his death left her unmarriagable and alone; painfully, she has come to terms with her fate, and in fact recongises that her position as head of the Dispensary allows her responsibity and fulfilment that would probably be denied to her in the outside world.

Convent novels are ripe ground for cliches - hysteria, sexual tension, power politics and implied lesbianism. All of these crop up in the narrative that follows, yet the absorbing plot is firmly grounded in the alien yet monotonous rhythm of a demanding round of daily life - work, prayer and worship. Sarah Dunant spent time in an Italian convent herself as part of her research, and it shows. You can almost smell the herbs growing in Zuama's garden, sense the excitement of the preparations for Carnival and see the patchwork of rooftops from the bell tower. The writing is gloriously sensual - from the rare luxury of a marzipan fruit exploding in a mouth denied most worldly pleasures to the soaring voices of the choir in the chapel, the reader is drawn into the novel's world.

But there are darker undercurrants too - the risk of hysteria, self-harm and what we would now call anorexia, the human tragedy of half a society's women shut away against their will, and the looming danger of post-Reformation church reforms threatening the privileges and pleasures that still remain to the convent's inmates. The characters and relationships are perfectly drawn and constantly absorbing and, as the plot builds to an unexpected conclusion, it is often only in retrospect that the reader recognises the subtle but signifiant developments that signpost Serafina's journey.

This is a world where nothing is quite as it seems - beneath the veil of humility there are ruthless power games going on, and desires turned inward upon the flesh, in response to impossible spiritual demands and the complete lack of alternatives, drive some of the women into a looking-glass world where the most apparently virtuous are also the most deluded and dangerous. This was my first experience of Sarah Dunant's work; I shall certainly be seeking our her two earlier stories of women's lives and options in Renaissance Italy. A gripping story that will keep you turning pages and leave you with food for thought.

Serafina enters the Ferrara convent of Santa Caterina as its prisoner, screaming like a madwoman. At sixteen she's one of two nobleman's daughters, but there is only dowry enough for one suitable marriage.

Like Dunant's other two historical Italian novels, this is set in the Renaissance - or the tail-end of it - but where her first two heroines were bold rebels, the story is seen more through the eyes of a middle-aged nun who has embraced the cloistered life.It's a time of political and religious ferment Serafina's dowry to the convent makes her especially desirable, but she is also possessed of a heavenly voice which will add to the lustre of their famous choir. In time, they believe, Serafina will, like the rest, accept that convent life is preferable to the brutality of the world outside, and turn to the ideal bridegroom, Christ. What they do not know, initially, is that she is already passionately in love.

Stroppy and silent, Serafina seems reminiscent of many modern teenage girls, and many readers will smile at some of the scenes Dunant depicts. Nevertheless, she forms a relationship with the humane, scholarly herbalist Suora Zuana whose pupil she becomes. Zuana was the daughter of a doctor, educated and impoverished so that the convent offered her both refuge and intellectual freedom to experiment. A tension between youth and age, science and superstition, love and chastity is set up. The convent's all-female world is deformed both physically, in many cases, but also morally and intellectually, with religious mania threatening to break out over a mysterious old nun who showed the stigmata. Yet it also contains genuine goodness and compassion. Threatened from without, the worldly Abbess also has an enemy within in Suora Umiliana, a fanatic who believes that the ancient Suora Magdalena's stigmata are a sign of insufficient piety.

Inevitably, when describing a life of privation and routine, there are some less gripping passages. We learn a good deal more about Zuana, her opinions of sex and her memories of her dead father, than the fiery young teenager who is central to the plot. There are stomach-churning descriptions of foul breath, starvation and purefaction. Serafina's attempts to contact her lover outside the impassably sheer convent walls seem unrewarded until, 150 pages in, comes the moment that makes your hair stand on end. Gathered together to sing invisibly for the city behind a grille, the choir's "best songbird" opens her mouth - only to be effortlessly outclassed by Serafina's voice, "ripe with youth and sharp as a golden spear," soaring unexpectedly above it. Why has she broken her silence?She knows that her lover is in the congregation; but the convent believes their novice has opened her heart to Christ.

From then on, we're never in doubt that Serafina is going to do all she can to escape. It's a battle of wits, feminine duplicity and politics of a kind that readers adore. The comical details delight: the posh, indoor nuns whose relations smuggle in silver trays to act as mirrors and aid in the removal of facial hair, or the breath-freshener and cure for piles concocted and sold to bishops. Yet what you remember most is the painful maternal passion nuns pour into small dogs - and the intellectual ability directed into musical composition and a culture which, in 1570, is doomed to be utterly repressed by the Council of Trent. An excellent read!