Maria Monk (June 27, 1816 – summer of 1849) was a Canadian woman whose book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836) claimed to expose systematic sexual abuse of nuns and infanticide of the resulting children by Catholic priests in her convent in Montreal.

[7][8] Monk’s book was published in an American atmosphere of anti-Catholic hostility (partly fueled by early 19th-century Irish and German Catholic immigration to the U.S.) and followed the 1834 Ursuline Convent Riots near Boston.

These were triggered by an incident in which one of the nuns left the convent but was persuaded to return on the following day by her superior, Mother Mary St. George, and by the Bishop of Boston, the Most Reverend Benedict Fenwick.

In 1835, Rebecca Reed published an anti-Catholic, gothic novel, a highly-colored account of her six months as an Episcopalian charity pupil at the Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Reed herself died of tuberculosis shortly after the publication of her book; her disease was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities to which she had been subjected at the convent.

Monk’s claims might have been modeled on the gothic novels that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a literary genre that had already been used to stoke anti-Catholic sentiments in such works as Denis Diderot's La Religieuse.

Monk’s story epitomizes the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, gloomily picturesque estate, where she learns dark secrets and escapes after harrowing adventures.

Historian Richard Hofstadter called it, in his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, "[p]robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom's Cabin.

"[10] Historian James M. O'Toole claimed it sold more copies than any book published before the American Civil War, save Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The inquiry found no evidence to support the claims, though many American Protestants refused to accept the conclusion and accused the bishop of dishonesty.

[12] One critic points out that a nun character in her book, Jane Ray, was actually residing with Monk at the Magdalen Asylum, rather than at the Hotel Dieu Nunnery.

The Boston Pilot published this obituary for her on September 8, 1849: "There is an end of Maria Monk; she died in the almshouse, still cooking as was her wont.