Authors and Books
for Children

Schooltime Shenanigans: Life With Mother Superior

Life With Mother Superior Out of print, available at ABEBOOKS

It's all-out war when Jane and her pal Mary skirmish with the nuns at the Catholic boarding school where they've been sent to get their high school education.

Jane Trahey's autobiographical novel is an episodic memoir of her years at an all-girls' academy where her main extracurricular activity seems to be trying to outwit the nuns.

From day one at dear old St. Marks, when Jane and Mary Clancey meet on arrival and quickly become partners-in-crime--trying to convince the faculty that their names are really Black Sock Pawnee and Fay Wray--the two recalcitrant girls engage in an extended battle against authority, as represented by the nuns in general and the canny Mother Superior in particular.


They sneak smokes, they do a brisk business selling guided tours of the off-limits nuns' cloister, they substitute bath salts in the nuns' sugar bowl. They cut swimming classes every week, they screw up the Living Rosary tableau and the school play; they blithely cover another student's head with plaster for an art project. They generally wreak havoc wherever they go, and they have a lot of fun--though Mother Superior is generally not amused.

Their jerky progress through four years of Catholic education is marked by a series of small adventures, gently funny without being over-the-top. Though there are occasional periods of undeclared truce--as when Mother Superior refashions the mismatched plaid dress Jane wants to enter in a sewing contest, and when the girls secretly suck lemons to distract their school's competitors in a band contest that Mother Superior desperately wants to win--generally the battle lines are clearly drawn.

The supporting characters are deftly and humorously drawn. Jane and Mary's St. Marks classmates include Lillian Quigley, a typical straight-A goody-two-shoes; woozy Jessie Wozynoski, a European girl with a habit of abruptly fainting; Marvel Ann Clancey, Mary's younger cousin; and Kathryn Murphy, who's also a rebel but never gets caught.

Among the faculty who try to mold the students into worthy examplars of Catholic girlhood are do-gooding Sister Mary William, who fanatically collects for the missions and runs the social action committee; beautiful Sister Constance, whom the girls adore; Sister Ligouri, who uses gambling to teach geometry; interpretive dancer Mrs. Mabel Dowling Phipps, who briefly tries to teach the fine art of fluttering like a leaf; and Miss Evangeline McBride, the lisping home ec teacher.

Life With Mother Superior was the basis for a 1966 film, The Trouble With Angels, starring Rosalind Russell as Mother Superior, Hayley Mills as the scathingly brilliant Mary, and June Harding as her coconspirator (here renamed Rachel). Directed by Ida Lupino and featuring Mary Wickes, Marge Redmond, Binnie Barnes, and Gypsy Rose Lee, the film is an extremely well done and enjoyable rendition of Trahey's story. Russell reprised her role in a 1968 sequel directed by James Neilson, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, but this film, about her clashes with a young nun (Stella Stevens) who is supposed to be progressive but is eminently obnoxious, is barely watchable.

Life With Mother Superior manages to poke fun at nuns and Catholic education without ever descending into mean-spiritedness or extreme caricature. Trahey evidences an underlying respect for her teachers, and her lighthearted touch keeps the story breezy and entertaining.