This scurrilous, anti-Catholic tract was published in 1836 by a Canadian-born woman who was supported in her lies by a group of Protestant clergymen in New York.
According to one account, author Maria Monk was a disturbed child who fled an asylum where her grandmother had committed her.
She disappeared in 1837 and resurfaced in Philadelphia, having deserted her husband and taken up with another man. She died in jail in 1849 after being arrested for pickpocketing in a bawdy house.
In 1874 a woman claiming to be her daughter published a book about her mother's last days and the daughter's conversion to Catholicism!