Mariette in Ecstasy is a 1991 novel written by Ron Hansen. it is set in a convent in New York in 1906. It is defined as a "wonderful and strange novel" and it is "beautifully described".
Plot State of New York, 1906: the seventeen-year-old Mariette Baptiste enters the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion at the priory of Our Lady of Sorrows as a postulant. Prioress of the convent is her biological sister Céline, twenty years elder than her, and, as it turns out, terminally ill with cancer. After leaving behind the bourgeois life Mariette had grown up in, she begins to experience visions and mystical crises that culminate with the appearance of stigmata on her body. As the prioress slowly succumbs to the cancer, the nuns are at a loss as to how to deal with the young postulant: some believe her, others consider her an impostor. After Mother Céline's death and burial, Mariette and the mistress of novices, Mother Saint-Raphael, is elected prioress again, Mariette's stigmata suddenly vanish and she is expelled from the convent. She returns to live with her father. It is suggested that the pain of the stigmata has remained; likewise, she still has a great longing for the consecrated life in the priory.
Awards In 1992, Hansen's book received the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal in Fiction and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association 1992 Award in Fiction.
Adaptions In 1996, the novel was adapted into a film (starring Eva Marie Saint as Mother Saint-Raphael) but it was never released because the production company and intended distributor, Savoy Pictures, who was co-producing the film with Price Entertainment and Rastar, went bankrupt.
In 2009, the novel was adapted for the stage and produced at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago. In 2019, the film was shown for the first time at the Camerimage International Film Festival by director John Bailey, during a retrospective of his career.
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