Whether she was born on 6 January, Ascension Day, or this is part of her mythology is unknown. Joan of Arc, or Jehanne D’Arc, was born in January 1412. Now Harrison turns her fascination with Catholicism and its female followers to a biography of a woman, really a girl, who continues to feature in the popular imagination. Religion’s solace threads through The Mother Knot, a harrowing book-length essay wherein Harrison disinters her mother’s remains, scattering them at sea in what one hopes is a final, healing ritual. Harrison followed her mother’s religious meanderings, writing in The Road to Santiago of her conversion to Catholicism at age 12: “At least I’m more Catholic than anything else.” Harrison’s writing life has plumbed this “more Catholic than anything else” in the Penguin Lives St Thèrése of Lisieux, and an aborted religious pilgrimage in The Road to Santiago, while the deeply revealing essays in Seeking Rapture probe beneath, or perhaps above, dailiness to the places where the transcendental occurs. Later writing ruthlessly examines her relationship with a difficult mother who abandoned Judaism for Christian Science before settling on Catholicism. Nor is she one to turn from daunting subject matter, as 1997’s The Kiss attests. Harrison has long been preoccupied with religious matters, particularly where they concern women. Kathryn Harrison’s fans will not be surprised by her decision to write Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured.
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