Abbey Girls: An Irish Boarding School Memoir

Abbey Girls: two sisters give a hilarious and poignant account of boarding school life in Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s.

Between the ages of 11 and 17, Mary and Valerie Behan attended a boarding school for Catholic girls in Dublin, Ireland called Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham. Founded in 1841, 'The Abbey' served as the Mother House for the Loreto Order of nuns, who established convents throughout the world to provide education to thousands of young girls. Now in their sixties, Mary and Valerie began a correspondence about their years at the Abbey. Although they shared many of the same experiences, to their astonishment and delight, they found that their memories of boarding school were substantially different. Abbey Girls recounts Mary and Valerie's school days in a series of letters that describe a unique, cloistered world governed by religion and tradition.