MONK, Maria, impostor, born about 1817; died in New York City about 1850. In 1835 she asserted in Montreal that she had escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in that city, of which she claimed to have been an inmate for years, and told a shocking story of crimes that had been committed there. Her stories met with no credence in Montreal, and she was shown to be a woman of bad character, whereupon she came to New York and repeated her story, which many believed.

She gained an entrance into good society, and received many attentions from those who gave credit to her tale; but it was conclusively proved to be a falsehood. She had even gone so far as to publish a plan of the interior of the nunnery, which was shown by careful examination to be incorrect in every particular, and in her second publication she described an island in St. Lawrence river that had no existence.

In the midst of the excitement that her story caused, Colonel William L. Stone, then editor of the "Commercial Advertiser," made a special journey to Montreal to investigate matters, with the result that he refuted Maria's story in "Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu" (New York, 1836). This raised against him a storm of abuse from her adherents, and Laughton Osborne made a bitter assault on him in "The Vision of Rubeta" (Boston, 1838), a clever but scurrilous poem.

Maria's adherents believed in her after she had been repeatedly exposed by men of high reputation, and the Protestant residents of Montreal finally thought it necessary to deny her allegations in a public meeting held for the purpose. Her imposture, considering the internal improbabilities of her story, is one of the most remarkable on record.

The "Know Nothing" party used it, to make political capital, and the burning of Roman Catholic churches in various cities was indirectly the result of it. Her "disclosures" were published in "Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk" (New York, 1836), and "Further Disclosures," with an introduction by Roy. J. J. Slocum (1836). Of the various editions of this book it was estimated by Cardinal Manning in 1851 that from 200,000 to 250,000 copies had appeared in England and this country. Maria left a daughter, who published an autobiography entitled "Maria Monk's Daughter" (New York, 1870). Editions of Maria’s “disclosures” continue to be published as recently as 2004.

Edited Appleton's Encyclopedia, by John Looby Copyright © 2001 StanKlos.com^TM

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