the spiral staircase my climb out of darkness

Very few people with two career failures, a suicide attempt and several visits to a mental hospital go on to find a vocation which has a place for all those experiences built right into it. Though she excelled in her work in English literature at Oxford, Armstrong had the misfortune of having a hostile examiner with enough political power in the university to fail her on her doctoral exams, even after she had completed a dissertation on Tennyson. Her failure to become an academic seems quixotically sad, equal in many ways to the tragi-comedy of her seven years in a convent. In fact, The Spiral Staircase is a deliberate rewriting of that second book, a way to retell the story of her newly secular life. The latter book is no longer in print, a fact which gladdens the heart of the author because she now considers that story to have been told prematurely. Armstrong’s first two books were memoirs written in comparative youth. The failure to become a nun occupies the first three chapters of the book and evidently retraces some of the story Armstrong has already told in two previous memoirs: Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World. She wanted to be a professor and was denied access to that profession by her examination committee. She wanted to be a nun and had to leave the convent in order to save her life. What makes her story fascinating, and inspiring, is that she speaks frankly of the two failures that launched her into her true vocation. With an archetypal pattern embedded in both her life and in the poem, Armstrong launches the story of her double voyage–leaving home to go to the convent and leaving the convent to enter the world. Armstong builds her book on the scaffolding provided by T.

Her memoir’s title follows the traditional pattern of separation and hints at the initiation and return that happens within the pages of the book: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Karen Armstrong’s life story illustrates the hero’s journey described in my previous post.

The spiral staircase my climb out of darkness