Mary Ann Starr ('I felt very uncomfortable')

Pellegrini's lithograph shows a nun in full black habit and white wimple seated sideways at a wooden pew or confessional rail, hands clasped, eyes downcast — the posture of enforced, slightly theatrical humility. The caption 'I felt very uncomfortable' anchors the image in courtroom testimony: Mary Ann Starr, late Mother Superior of the Convent at Hull, had recently given evidence in the Saurin v. Star convent scandal, a sensational civil trial in which a dismissed nun sued her superiors for persecution. The caricature exaggerates Starr's heavy-lidded, long-nosed features in Pellegrini's usual manner, casting her as a figure of pious discomfort caught between religious authority and public scrutiny.