This was only the most popular in a genre that played on common prurience and anti-Catholicism. A fabrication, it purported to reveal the lurid goings-on that were suspected to occur behind the walls of Catholic convents and monasteries. (The hysterical fear and suspicion toward such institutions had provoked the burning of the Charlestown convent two years earlier.) It sold 300,000 copies in the United States, a nation of fewer than 20 million.
Ruth Hughes, "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk"