For one who had spent almost her entire adult life in a secluded Benedictine abbey, Dame Felicitas Corrigan, who has died aged 95, was a shrewd and often wry observer of the outside world. Perhaps not so much of its passing fads and fashions, or of the names and faces that briefly capture the public imagination, but of some of the essentials of everyday secular life. In particular she had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the many aspects of human friendship.
This insight informed the dozen or so books she wrote, including a memoir of her good friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and biographies of the poets George Thomas and Helen Waddell (this last book won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1986).
Her best known work, however, remains an account of the unexpected friendship between her first superior at Stanbrook Abbey, Dame Laurentia McLachan, the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the scholar Sir Sydney Cockerell: In a Great Tradition (1956), which was later expanded into The Nun, The Infidel And The Superman (1985). The book became first a successful West End play, starring John Gielgud, and later a film. Both were called Best Of Friends.
One of Dame Laurentia's maxims for her nuns was "you may be enclosed but you don't need to have enclosed minds". Dame Felicitas - the title Dame is given to English Benedictine nuns in preference to Sister - took her superior at her word. She developed her knowledge of the world principally by forging warm and enduring friendships with the many who came to see her at Stanbrook Abbey in Callow End, Worcestershire. The fact that the encounters took place through a metal grille did not seem to limit their beneficial effect for both sides.
Some of these visitors were famous. Alec Guinness and the novelist Rumer Godden were regulars. Godden believed the prayers of the nuns at Stanbrook had saved the life of her grand-daughter. Dame Felicitas also helped her in the writing of her 1969 convent-based novel, In This House Of Brede. Others were nieces and nephews, the children of Dame Felicitas's seven siblings. While others had simply read her books and written to her. Like Dame Laurentia, she maintained a large correspondence, often resorting to circulars in an attempt to keep her many contacts satisfied.
She was aware, too, of the mystique that the choice of an enclosed life had given her. On her occasional forays out of the abbey she cut quite a dash; as, for example, in 1980 when she attended the National Pastoral Congress of the English Catholic Church in Liverpool, or in 1991 when she gave a well-attended London lecture. At a time when most female religious orders had abandoned wimples and black robes, she immediately stood out. But it was the calmness and serenity that she radiated and the quick and infectious wit behind an initially forbidding face that drew people to her.
Her talents were many. Watching Dame Felicitas captivate her audience with her lecture, actress Dulcie Gray, who had appeared in Best Of Friends, speculated that such stage presence would have made her a great actress. She excelled at the abbey as a gardener and librarian, but her first love was music. In her youth she had won an organ scholarship in the archdiocese of Liverpool, and it was while studying plainsong that she first visited Stanbrook and met Dame Laurentia. From her earliest days in the abbey, she was its organist, doubling up as choir mistress for long periods. Poor eyesight finally forced her retirement in 1990.
She could be formidable in debate. One of her particular interests was the role of women in Catholicism and she wrote an approving foreword to a book detailing the wider use of female talents in the early church. She was not, however, a supporter of women's ordination, being too conscious of the tradition and history of the church.
Born Kathleen Corrigan into a Catholic family in Liverpool, she was encouraged in her interest in music from an early age by an ambitious mother, even though her father's earnings as a driver meant that money was always tight at home. At 15 she was the paid organist at a local church. She studied English at Liverpool University and received a teaching diploma from Cambridge.
Hers, by the standards of the time, was a mature vocation. She was 25 when she entered Stanbrook and 30 when she took her solemn vows. It was not, she liked to recall, a life she had embarked upon lightly. "Mother, do you think I have a vocation?" she asked her novice mistress soon after arriving at Stanbrook. "Yes dear, I do," the novice mistress replied. "Damn," said Felicitas.
Stanbrook was her home for 70 years, save for a brief spell in the mid-1970s when she travelled to Nigeria to help a new community of Benedictine nuns there. It was not a successful initiative and she returned home.
There was always a sense in which she could have made her mark wherever she chose, but it was that rare combination of spirituality and scholarship at the abbey that made her such an extraordinary and inspiring character.
· Felicitas (Kathleen) Corrigan, nun, writer and musician, born March 6 1908; died October 7 2003.