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 * Monastery

Draft of "Monasteries in Literature"
Matthew Lewis' 1796 Gothic Novel The Monk has as parts of its setting both a fictional monastery and nunnery in Spain at the time of the Inquisition. Many have interpreted Lewis' novel as a critique of Catholicism. Jane Austen sets the latter half of her 1818 novel Northanger Abbey in an out of use monastery, reflecting on Henry VIII's abolition of monasticism in England and the contemporary abolition of monasticism in France in the wake of the French Revolution. Convents for female monastics, or nunneries, were often portrayed as punishments for women unable to marry.