Diderot's The Nun (la Religieuse) Is The Seemingly True Story Of A Young Girl Forced By Her Parents To Enter A Convent And Take Holy Orders. A Novel Mingling Mysticism, Madness, Sadistic Cruelty And Nascent Sexuality, It Gives A Scathing Insight Into The Effects Of Forced Vocations And The Unnatural Life Of The Convent. This New Translation Includes Diderot's All-important Prefatory Material. -;'you Can Leave A Forest, But You Can Never Leave A Cloister; You Are Free In The Forest, But You Are A Slave In The Cloister.' Diderot's The Nun (la Religieuse) Is The Seemingly True Story Of A Young Girl Forced By Her Parents To Enter A Convent And Take Holy Orders. A Novel Mingling Mysticism, Madness, Sadistic Cruelty And Nascent Sexuality, It Gives A Scathing Insight Into The Effects Of Forced Vocations And The Unnatural Life Of The Convent. A Succ--egrave--;s De Scandale At The End Of The Eighteenth Century, It Has Attracted And Unsettled Readers Ever Since. For Diderot's Novel Is Not Simply A Story Of A Young Girl With A Bad Habit; It Is Also A Powerfully Emblematic Fable About Oppression And Intolerance. This New Translation Includes Diderot's All-important Prefatory Material, Which He Placed, Disconcertingly, At The End Of The Novel, And Which Turns What Otherwise Seems Like An Exercise In Realism Into What Is Now Regarded As A Masterpiece Of Proto-modernist Fiction. -