Tinteán

A Book Review by Dianne Hall

Jeff Kildea, Sister Liguori: The nun who divided a nation, Connor Court Publishing, 2024.
RRP: $34.95
ISBN: 9781923224063

In Sister Liguori, Jeff Kildea examines the case of Bridget Partridge – known as Sister Liguori  – a 30 year old Irish-born nun who ran away from her convent in Wagga Wagga dressed only in her nightdress in July 1920. Over the next fifteen months, her ‘escape’ from the Mount Erin convent became a national sensation provoking court cases, lurid newspaper articles, heated public debates between Catholic bishops and Protestant ministers, intervention by the Loyal Orange Institute, and an alleged kidnapping on the streets of Sydney. By the end of 1921, public attention shifted elsewhere and Sister Liguori, was able to live out her life as Bridget Partridge in relative obscurity and peace with the family who had taken care of her after she left the convent. She seemingly never regretted her decisions on that cold July night in 1920.

Partridge’s attempt to take charge of her own future was overshadowed by powerful men campaigning for much higher stakes than the fate of one Irish woman. As Jeff Kildea demonstrated in his previous work, Tearing the Fabric: Sectarian in Australia 1910-1925 (2002), sectarianism grew in the 1920s against the legacy of divisions on the home front during the Great War and the ongoing war in Ireland. In the previous few years, Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, had voiced his frustration at ‘Sinn Feiners’ who had, he argued, campaigned against Australian interests by voting against the introduction of military conscription in 1916 and 1917. Unmasking what appeared to be cells of armed Irish revolutionaries training in the Blue Mountains in 1918 also stoked fears that Irish republican violence was interfering in the peaceful Australian political landscape. At the same time, long-standing public campaigns by ultra-Protestants alleged unspecified abuses inflicted on women and girls ‘hidden’ in Catholic convents. These allegations were dismissed by the Catholic clergy as nonsense and the campaigns for ‘inspection’ of convents were never successful. This sectarianism storm, though, meant that the public were primed to believe that vulnerable women were being forced to flee the clutches of the ruthless Irish Catholic church, clad only in their nightdresses. 

As Kildea demonstrates in Sister Ligouri, the reality was much more complex. Kildea brings his formidable knowledge of legal practice to this book. The book is organised chronologically through detailed, day by day descriptions of the events that led Sr Ligouri to leave the convent and the subsequent efforts of Bishop Dwyer of Wagga Wagga to locate her. Along the way Kildea outlines how the bishop requested that she be arrested under the Lunacy Act. She was then declared sane after a formal hearing. She, however, sued for damages in the Supreme Court. At this point, Kildea could have given more attention to the implications for Partridge of the threat she faced over her arrest under the Lunacy Act, which could have led to her being involuntarily placed in an asylum for many years.

Newspaper reporting of the legal cases was accompanied by near hysterical accounts by Protestants about abuses within Catholic convents and equally shrill defences of religious women, and the bishop’s duty of care towards them, from Catholic clergy. Kildea gives detailed descriptions of the minutiae of the court cases and outlines all the evidence presented by both sides. However, in describing the various documents and timelines, he seems to take the statements of many involved, particularly the Catholic clergy, at face value. To modern eyes the fact that a 30-year-old woman was deemed unfit to take charge of her own destiny needs more explanation than Kildea gives: that the bishop was responsible for her under canon law. Indeed I would also have liked the book to provide more contextual information on what a nun like Sr Liguori would have known about the provisions that would have allowed her to leave the convent. The Mother Superior stated that nuns were free to leave and that there were processes to allow this, but did Liguori know about them? 

In the barrage of words and assumptions written about her, it is easy for Bridget Partridge and her experiences, hopes and desires to be obscured. Indeed there are more questions to be explored about Partridge’s treatment at the hands of those, including Catholic clergy, who used her misery to further their own political agendas. Kildea’s book is a useful start for future scholars who will take up the challenge of analysing these questions, particularly given what is now known about historical abuse within Catholic religious institutions. 

In the epilogue to this book, Kildea acknowledges the tragedy of recent revelations of long suppressed abuses in institutions run by Catholic religious women, such as orphanages, Magdalen laundries and industrial schools. More could have been made of this context throughout the descriptions of events in the book. As he outlines in the epilogue, there is no evidence that the Mount Erin convent in Wagga Wagga was implicated in any of the abuses uncovered by recent revelations. Partridge did accuse her fellow nuns of trying to poison her, she expressed fear of the power of the Mother Superior and was plainly frightened when she left her bed in the middle of the night. Kildea however could not find any evidence to support Partridge’s allegations about poisoning.  In many ways the book misses an opportunity to analyse how the recently revealed climate of secrecy within the church about allegations of abuse may have affected Partridge and influenced her decisions. 

Kildea describes how narratives of ‘escaped nuns’ were a popular genre of sensationalised anti-Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century English-speaking world. A small number of women who had ‘escaped’ convents went on speaking tours sponsored by the Loyal Orange Institute, lecturing about their experiences in veiled sexualised terms to bolster ultra-Protestant attempts to ‘open’ the convents to ‘inspection’ in Australia, North America and England. We will probably never know the full details of why Sister Ligouri left the Mount Erin convent, nor why, as Bridget Partridge, she chose to remain with the family of Congregationalist minister, Rev. William Touchell, for the rest of her life.  While other popular narratives of ‘escape’ from convents detail overtly sexualised abuse of women and girls, there is, as Kildea acknowledges, no mention of any sexual element in Partridge’s dissatisfaction with convent life. 

It would have been interesting to read in the book about the longer-term ramifications of the Catholic clergy’s responses to Partridge’s claims. Catholic writers and churchmen usually claimed, correctly, that ‘escaped nun’ narratives were used by Protestants to undermine the Catholic church’s community standing.  As part of their response to such narratives, the clergy implied that any allegations of abuse by women and girls, like Partridge, who ‘escaped’ could not be trusted because they were overly emotional or mentally ill. This then meant that the substance of testimonies by women like Bridget Partridge could be easily dismissed. Perhaps it is this long shadow of suppression and disbelief of women’s experiences that is the most enduring and damaging legacy of Sister Ligouri’s ‘escape’ from the Mount Erin convent on that winter night.

Dianne Hall, Victoria University, Melbourne. 

Professor Dianne Hall has an international track record in the histories of gender, violence, memory and religion in Ireland and the Irish diaspora, especially in Australia.