The Chinese Garden.

Bookseller Notes

Scarce. Manning's novel, the second under her own name following 'Look, Stranger' and two under the pseudonym 'Mary Voyle', is based on her own troubled years at a girls boarding school in Devon in the late 1920s. The closing chapter, following an attempted suicide, reverts to the first-person narration with which the novel opens - between, the story of Rachel's time at Bampfield is related in the third-person. It is a tale of adolescent awakenings - literary and sexual, the two combined in the scandal caused by the discovery of her friend Margaret's possession of 'The Well of Loneliness', with consequences both personal and punitive for them both.