She was asked if she knew the difference between a cope and a chasuble, and did not get a job. In an attempt to break into journalism, Furlong presented herself to the formidable Rosamund Essex, editor of the Church Times. After education at Harrow county girls' school and University College, London, she enrolled at Pitmans, and seemed destined for a dreary career as a shorthand typist. She, herself, was baptised as an Anglican in a conventional sort of way, but became, at a very early age, a potential outsider even as a child, she felt herself instinctively in sympathy with non-churchgoers.
Monica was a second daughter, and her mother made no secret of the fact that she wanted a boy Monica attributed the onset of a fairly disabling stammer, and a terror of using the telephone, to her mother's dissatisfaction with her gender. Her relations with her mother, a sometimes caustic agnostic, were more ambiguous.
Her father, to whom she was particularly close, was a Roman Catholic who served mass at Westminster cathedral. Aware in later life of the dangers of drugs, she nevertheless always regarded the drug-taking, together with a Freudian psychoanalysis in her early 50s, as a vital part of her psychological and spiritual growth.īorn and brought up in Kenton, Middlesex, Furlong always retained a nostalgic devotion to the suburbs. Very much a child of her time, she experimented with LSD in her late 30s, and had the distinction of seeing her book Travelling In (1971), describing the experience, banned from Church of Scotland bookshops. In her book With Love To The Church (1965), she wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, of her disillusion with the apparent inability of the established Church to touch the hearts and minds of men and women of goodwill. Like many intellectuals, her life was, in some ways, a protracted search for truth, accompanied by frequent disillusionment, most notably with the organised structures of society. But she was always on the lookout for good causes to espouse, and once she had thrown in her lot with the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and with the aims of secular feminism in general, she became to many women - and to many men as well, especially homosexuals - not just a beacon of light, more a flaming torch. Monica Furlong, who has died of cancer aged 72, would have achieved distinction through her writings alone. Obituary from The Guardian, Friday January 17 2003
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