Mariette in Ecstasy

Ron Hansen sets the narrative in upstate New York in 1906, following seventeen-year-old Mariette Baptiste as she enters Our Lady of Sorrows, where her older sister presides as prioress.

Behind the cloister's walls, the Sisters of the Crucifixion maintain an austere discipline of prayer and silence. The novel charts the priory's upheaval when bleeding wounds mirroring the crucifixion manifest upon the young postulant's hands and feet.

Hansen examines the ambiguous nature of religious devotion, tracing how confessors, physicians, and cloistered nuns struggle to distinguish genuine ecstasy from hysteria or deceit.

• Catholic Mysticism: Mariette experiences ecstatic trances and private interior visions that echo the fourteenth-century revelations of Julian of Norwich.


• Catholic Faith: Eighty-year-old chaplain Father Henri Marriott meticulously examines the postulant's confessional letters, torn between awe at possible miracles and fear of deception.


• Small Town Setting: Word of the unexplained phenomena spreads beyond the church walls into rural Arcadia, drawing crowds of upstate villagers who gather in hopes of witnessing a miracle.


• Also by This Author: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Desperadoes and Atticus.