Rebecca Reed was a young Episcopalian woman from Boston who had attended the school operated by the Ursulines in 1831 as a charity scholar: a day student for whom the convent waived tuition fees.
In 1832, she declared her intent to enter the Ursuline novitiate, but left the convent after six months as a postulant (originally one who makes a request or demand, hence a candidate).
In the memoir, Reed described the convent as a prison, where young girls were forced into Roman Catholicism, with grotesque punishment for those who refused.
Some authors, including a former student at the school, have speculated that discussion of the manuscript may have contributed to the anti-Catholic sentiment which incited riots.
[3] Reed's book was soon followed by another bestselling supposed exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery, (1836) in which Maria Monk claimed that a convent in Montreal served as a harem for Catholic priests, and that any resulting children were murdered after baptism.