Eighteenth-century France: sixteen-year-old Suzanne is forced into a convent by parents who find it cheaper than a dowry. In letters pleading for a Marquis's help, she tells her story and fights the family, Church, and state that confined her.
Freedom depends less on how harsh a place is than on whether you can walk out of it. A wild forest is dangerous, but you can leave it. A cloister may be calm, but once its door is shut behind you for good, you are a slave there.
Parents can push a young person into a permanent religious vow she never chose. The promise is still treated as binding for life. What looks like a sacred calling can be a family's decision dressed up as the child's own.
Locking people away under rules of celibacy and withdrawal from the world does not lift them to a higher life. It buries them alive. The enclosed life takes away love, family, and ordinary human contact while the person is still alive to feel each loss.