The Magdalen

Rating:
Summary: Effective BirthControl for Teenagers
Review: A lot of feeling sorry for yourself in this book and no redeemable characters. Society was a lot harder on teenager pregancy 50 years ago, especially in Ireland. The nuns provided a home for these girls and I'm sure the nuns didn't live so much better than the girls themselves. This wasn't 1990s America. I guess I'm not such a fan of having teenagers "bring their babies to school every day" and "playing parents" as is accepted today.

Rating:
Summary: Wayward Girls and Fallen Women
Review: Esther Doyle is unmarried and pregnant, in the rustic, rural town of Connemara. Her lover has jilted her at the first words of the unwanted pregnancy. Esther is left alone to deal with the scandal. However, the only people Esther expected help from, her family, are ashamed and resentful. Her mother and brothers banish her from the home, sending her to Dublin.

Esther's new home is The Magdalen Home for Wayward and Fallen Home. A laundry, run by nuns, is where she will earn her keep. When her nine months have passed, her baby will taken from her and given up for adoption. Esther and the other women work long, hard hours on their feet and are under the constant watch of the nuns. The women live the lives of prisoners. There is no recreation, no fun. The women are there to pay penance for their sins and ask God for forgiveness. However, these women, otherwise knows as "The Maggies" manage to form strong frienships. Their companionship allows Esther to fight her way out of a deep depression and struggle to reclaim her life. The Maggies help Esther to realize that her baby deserves a happy life and so does she.

I have read quite a few books about the famous "Magdalen Laundries" that were once popular in Ireland. Many are dark and depressing. However, The Magdalen, is slightly more uplifting than most. Of course, this is not exactly a happy story, but these laundries did exist and it is something that many people have never heard of.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful book
Review: I recommended this book to many friends & relatives - it was such a good story. The main character Esther is very likable. She's a strong character with human flaws & your heart goes out to her. The book shows how unfair the double standard is for women vs men in many ways. I just loved it. Every part in the book keeps your interest - makes you want to keep reading until the end. For a woman to become pregnant before she's married in those times & in such a Catholic country could lead a woman to be treated so unfairly by todays general standards in the US. Again, I highly recommend this book. I don't want to say anymore without ruining the story!

Rating:
Summary: A good read but very sad
Review: I sincerely enjoyed this novel but the subject matter is truly sad and disturbing. The title refers to any woman who was a resident/boarder of the Magdalen Laundry workhouses run by the Sisters of the Holy Saints in Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These workhouses sprang up as a response to the problem of prostitution but then slowly evolved into houses where any "fallen" woman might be taken or assigned to live. These women might have been convicted of a minor crime, be pregnant and unwed or just mentally unstable. The purpose of the workhouses was for the woman, or penitent, to atone for her sins or wayward behavior.

This novel is set in the 1940's and 50's. Esther Doyle is a young Irish woman living a very hard life in Connemara, Ireland, helping her mother to care for the house, her five brothers and a mentally challenged younger sister. Esther has little life to call her own and when she meets an attractive and winsome older man she is immediately smitten with him and shortly finds herself pregnant with his child. Sadly, he then wants nothing more to do with her. After two separate tragedies claim the lives of two of Esther's family members, her mother retreats into a world of her own and goes practically berserk upon learning of her daughter's condition. Esther is ordered to leave the family home and ultimately finds herself in Dublin at the Magdalen Home where she will have no option but to work for her keep until her baby is born and then consent to give the baby up for adoption.

I enjoyed Ms.McKenna's novel but it is very sobering and her depictions of the nuns who run the workhouse are harsh and brutal. I had never heard of the Magdalen Laundries before coming across this book and am glad to know that such places are no longer in operation. A very good read, but have your tissues handy.


Rating:
Summary: powerful historical morality tale
Review: In 1952 Dublin in the birthing room of the Sisters of the Holy Saints Magdalen Home for Wayward Girls and Fallen Women, between contractions Esther Doyle thinks back on how she ended amongst the abandoned. Esther knows that in spite of her family rejection due to her unmarried pregnancy and her lover's betrayal she is a good person. From western Ireland, since arriving in the grim place, she wonders if she will ever see the ocean with her child.

Esther has earned her room, board, and medical assistance doing laundry while waiting the birth. She knows her child will reside next door in the almost as grim orphanage, but at least the infant will have sustenance. However, she knows her unborn will receive little else as even the nuns reject the infant's innocence in spite their lofty calling. Still Esther has learned from her sister "Maggies" and dreams of a life for herself with her child outside this convent prison.

With the acceptance of out of wedlock children in recent years, THE MAGDALEN may seem obsolete, but instead, the novel is a powerful historical tale that sheds a light on 1950s morality. The story line brilliantly written in a first person dialogue enables the audience to feel all that Esther feels as she garners empathy from modern day readers to the plights of her and her soon to be born child in a world that condemns even the blameless. Marita Conlon-Mckenna provides fans of mid twentieth century historical novels with a juggernaut of a morality tale that is one of the genre's best in recent years.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Characters that stir you up...
Review: that's what I look for in a book, people that get me involved. I get paid to proofread and copyedit books. Over the last 25 years and more than four thousand books, The Magdalen ranks in my top 100.

Rating:
Summary: Followers of Magdalen
Review: This story as told by Esther tells us where we have been and how important it is to humanity to never return. The reality of the title could not be more in line to a previous story in Christian history that of Mary Magdalen, this the story of a group of young women that were out-cast in Ireland during this period. I feel the writer has delivered the message in sincerity to the facts and to the times and culture of 1950's Ireland and across much of the world with the exception of how these young women were placed in these institutions and stripped of their human dignity and basic human rights.
Why in Ireland and other places were not the men held to task? Why was the moral obligation placed entirely upon the female of a relationship that obviously requires two? No where in the theology of Christianity is the male placed in superiority and the female a lesser being, except by the interpretation of man in the development of early Christianity and in the established church. Not to minimize the help the church apparently provided with food and shelter, but to question why the church took a moral high ground in placing itself in the position of judging these women and their families, thus releasing the males from their responibilities and their Christian duties toward these women? Why do societies worship class distinction above humanity? Why do we as a society hand over personal responibility to an established religion and expect just and fair treatment? These questions present in Ireland then and still today and elsewhere in the world should call everyone to reflection and revision.
Throughout the book we read little to none regarding the father of this child of Esther, why? How could the church stand on a moral high ground in Ireland or elsewhere when its position was truly one-sided and at times inhumanly governed? How could religious orders support this position? The Magdalen presents these issues in their day and and we can read the effects the position of the church and culture had and continues to have today to some extent.
These women are indeed followers of Magdalen, out-cast by the oppression of the times and culture of her day. This book is superb and offers us the experience of the past and a chance to create a brighter future.

Rating:
Summary: Followers of Magdalen
Review: This story as told by Esther tells us where we have been and how important it is to humanity to never return. The reality of the title could not be more in line to a previous story in Christian history that of Mary Magdalen, this the story of a group of young women that were out-cast in Ireland during this period. I feel the writer has delivered the message in sincerity to the facts and to the times and culture of 1950's Ireland and across much of the world with the exception of how these young women were placed in these institutions and stripped of their human dignity and basic human rights.
Why in Ireland and other places were not the men held to task? Why was the moral obligation placed entirely upon the female of a relationship that obviously requires two? No where in the theology of Christianity is the male placed in superiority and the female a lesser being, except by the interpretation of man in the development of early Christianity and in the established church. Not to minimize the help the church apparently provided with food and shelter, but to question why the church took a moral high ground in placing itself in the position of judging these women and their families, thus releasing the males from their responibilities and their Christian duties toward these women? Why do societies worship class distinction above humanity? Why do we as a society hand over personal responibility to an established religion and expect just and fair treatment? These questions present in Ireland then and still today and elsewhere in the world should call everyone to reflection and revision.
Throughout the book we read little to none regarding the father of this child of Esther, why? How could the church stand on a moral high ground in Ireland or elsewhere when its position was truly one-sided and at times inhumanly governed? How could religious orders support this position? The Magdalen presents these issues in their day and and we can read the effects the position of the church and culture had and continues to have today to some extent.
These women are indeed followers of Magdalen, out-cast by the oppression of the times and culture of her day. This book is superb and offers us the experience of the past and a chance to create a brighter future.