The Abbess of Crewe: Muriel Spark's Watergate in a Convent
About this episode
Melanie and Ed discuss Muriel Spark's novella 'The Abbess of Crewe' and its relevance to contemporary politics.
Muriel Spark wrote it in months while Nixon was still in office. Fifty-two years later, Melanie and Ed test whether the joke still lands. Spark's 90-page novella, subtitled "A Modern Morality Tale," relocates Watergate to a Benedictine convent in Cheshire. The newly elected Abbess Alexandra has bugged the grounds, rigged her election, and reads Yeats and Milton over dinner while her sisters eat dog food. Her working theory is that the world wants a myth and facts don't matter. A stolen thimble doubles as the Watergate burglary; Sister Gertrude, the Kissinger figure, phones in advice from Peru while negotiating between cannibals and vegetarians. Melanie carries Alexandra's strategy forward into 2026 without much trouble; Ed flags the tonal divergence — Spark's abbess is composed and unbothered, where Nixon was paranoid and raving at portraits. The honest verdict is mixed: dry, esoteric, of its time. Glenda Jackson played Alexandra in Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1977 film adaptation Nasty Habits. Related episodes: - Black Narcissus (1947) — https://whothehellarewe.libsyn.com/website/10th-anniversary - Lilies of the Field (1963) —…
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