A life less extraordinary

Jenny Newman quit life as a nun to pursue a career as a writer and academic. It was an agonising wrench but, as she tells Harriet Swain, cloisters, medieval traditions and hierarchies are as much a part of campuses as of convents

After five years in a semi-enclosed order, Jenny Newman went to her room one night, replaced her habit with ordinary clothes and left her convent life for good. It was the traditional way to leave a community that strictly forbade its members to discuss their doubts. But it was "a psychologically painful and crass way of handling it", Newman says. She still remembers the day she left as one of the most agonising of her life. "I felt a failure, as if I had let down the whole community".

A chic woman with clipped grey hair and unlined face, she is now a lecturer in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University, with two novels under her belt and a third on the way. While she claims not to regret for a moment leaving the religious order, she recognises that her experiences there were crucial in shaping the person she is today. "I am always fascinated by the path not taken," she says.

This has been a theme of her two novels - Going In, about a young woman making the decision to join a convent, and Life Class, about a nun deciding to leave, which is just out in paperback. Newman confesses that although her work is not autobiographical, some of the characters are versions of the person she might have been had she stayed. While the books are light reads with feisty characters and cliffhanger chapter endings, they begin from a theoretical base, Newman reveals, and are driven by plot and themes rather than character. "I would like to see them as strongly political in terms of their treatment of class and gender and power politics," she says.

Life Class, for example, is set against the background of the Toxteth riots, a symbol of the struggle between the forces of change and traditionalism that dominates the novel. The main character, Maureen, is acutely sensitive to the hierarchical nature both of her convent, where, as a lay sister, she is subservient to the choir nuns, and of Liverpool University, where she takes an art history degree alongside students from much smarter backgrounds than her own.

Newman concedes this is not the only parallel between convent and university life. "Liverpool John Moores is a very secular institution but a lot of universities - especially places such as Oxford - are very similar to religious institutions," she says. "It is not surprising that when I got to Liverpool University I felt quite at home there."

She sees connections between the way both religious and academic foundations are based on a traditional, medieval way of life, which is now under threat. But what attracted her first to the convent, then to academia and later to novel writing was the chance to enter and explore a different world - an inner world. While she abandoned her religious convictions a few years after leaving the convent, this fascination with analysing the workings of inner life is something that has stayed with her.

"Catholicism is a religion that encourages you as a child to pay a lot of attention to what is going on inside and to assess why you do things," she says. "Novels also explore conscience and motives. In general religious life you have to examine your conscience a couple of times a day, which is something that is useful for a novelist."

Her mother converted to Catholicism when Newman was seven, but left the church soon afterwards and the family was not particularly religious. Nor was Newman a religious child. But, aged 17, she found the idea that she had a vocation, that her future could be explained simply by the fact that God was calling her to do something a heady experience. "It is quite a grand thing, when you think about it," she says. "That you are being chosen by God and are entering a way of life where the ultimate aim is sainthood."

But it was still the idea of being a nun rather than the relationship with God it entailed that she found interesting. She saw it as one of the few opportunities for women of her generation to make something of their lives. While those who grew up with her in the 1950s and 1960s were being encouraged to go to university, she says it was still with a view to getting married. "I was entering what I thought was a world where women had a destiny." In fact, she soon realised that the association she had made between entering a convent and feminism was misplaced and that the church was both patriarchal and sometimes even psychologically damaging for women.

Life Class shows hints of this, depicting an institution seething with petty jealousies and betrayals, the fallout from a thwarted lesbian love affair and, eventually, a suicide.

When Newman was a postulant in Ireland, she had to kiss the floor if she was late for a meal and confess sins such as dropping cutlery or running in a corridor. Large parts of the day were spent in silence. Her way out came when she was sent to study theology in London and then English at Liverpool University, with a view to helping the order in its teaching role. She became fascinated by the process of learning and the company of her fellow students and began to find herself longing for Monday mornings.

But it took her more than a year to summon up the courage to leave. When she did, she studied for a post-graduate certicate in education at King's College, London, before returning to Liverpool as a secondary teacher and then moving into academia, where she found literature a more satisfying way than religion of exploring her interest in feminism and sexual politics. She says teaching has been a constant in her life, running right through her time in the convent and difficult years afterwards to her present position as novelist and tutor.

She is now co-editing a creative writing handbook - The Writer's Workbook, to be published in August - and has started an anthology of interviews with contemporary writers, asking them about how they write.

Meanwhile, she is working on her third novel, set in a remote peasant community in the Pyrenees. It is a community based on a medieval way of life that is on the brink of disappearing and that must face up to the way it interacts with the outside world. So while the story has nothing to do with nuns - or academics - the theme is familiar.

Newman says that when she tried to write directly about her convent experiences she found that she could not depict the full truth of the situation. Writing novels has proved a more effective way of exploring the themes that interest her.

"Life is short of beginnings and endings," she says. "You never quite know where you come from and you never quite know where you are going to end up. Even big days such as new jobs and weddings always feel a bit ordinary in retrospect. Novels satisfy an important human need to shape events."

Life Class is published by Arrow, Pounds 5.99.