I’m trying to remember the name of a sweetly simple novel, not very long and probably published in the 1960s, about a young motherless girl whose father brings her to a convent so the nuns can raise her while he–works? Travels? I can’t recall. I believe it was written in first person, and the girl lives a fairly idyllic existence with the nuns, who treat her with every kindness until her father returns. She doesn’t always understand their little jokes, such as one involving “elbow grease” that I never forgot. The title and author, however, are another story.
What comes to mind is Daddy Longlegs by Jean Webster and I’ll leave it as a possibility though it must be wrong: the girl might have just been in a boarding school, not a convent; and the man is not her father but eventually her husband.
Possibly: An Angel Grows Up, by Tere Rios.
Does the girl have a sexual experience with one of the other girls? Then she is accused of witching the other girl?