Introduction to the author
KAREN ARMSTRONG
Karen Armstrong was born November 14, 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire. Her family is of Irish Roman Catholic extraction.
In her late teens she joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching order and was a religious from 1962 to 1969. Her order sent her to Saint Anne’s College, Oxford, to study English. Armstrong left the order while she was still an undergraduate. She suffered from ill-health and was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy. She describes this period of her life in her autobiography The Spiral Staircase (2004). After leaving the convent, she had great difficulty in adjusting to life in the outside world. In Through the Narrow Gate (1982), she recounted her difficulties with convent life.
