Nanda Grey is nine when her mother decides God wants her educated at the Convent of the Five Wounds. The place runs on absolute control—where you sleep, what you wear, which words you’re allowed to speak. The nuns have a specific job: break the girls’ wills. Remake them into something obedient and sexless and properly Catholic.
The girls find their own language anyway. In the hallways between classes, in notes passed during chapel, in the dark of the dormitory after lights out. These friendships aren’t casual. They’re intense and physical and charged with the kind of feeling that the nuns specifically warned against—’particular friendships,’ they called them, the ones that became too intimate, too focused. Banned. Monitored. Dangerous.
Nanda experiences her first real desire in this place designed to eliminate desire. The friendships with other girls give her something the rituals and prayers can’t—color, sensation, the knowledge that there’s a version of herself beyond what the school is trying to carve her into.
She starts writing. A novel, hidden and furious, exploring everything the convent says she shouldn’t want to know about. Worldly things. Adult things. Her own body. The manuscript is discovered the way forbidden things always are—through the carelessness of believing you’re safe, or through someone deciding to betray you.
The confrontation is total. The school has absolute power and no mercy. Expulsion comes swiftly. But that’s almost mercy compared to what really happens: they break something in her that doesn’t fully repair. The independent spirit, the part of her that was starting to know what she wanted—that gets crushed beneath the institution’s need to enforce obedience.
She leaves the convent diminished in ways that aren’t visible. The damage is the kind that follows you into the rest of your life.
Details
| ISBN: 9781844083787 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Coming of Age |
| Subject(s): Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Coming Of Age; Fiction / General; FICTION / Literary |
| Publication Date: 2006-08-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Virago |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 224 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: While primarily an autobiographical ‘coming-of-age’ novel about the stifling environment of a Catholic convent school, it is a foundational text in the ‘fiction of the gynaeceum’ (female-centric spaces). It is widely categorized as Lesbian Gothic due to its focus on intense, eroticized same-sex friendships and the transgressive nature of female desire within a repressive patriarchal institution. Multiple editions exist. |
| Book_ID: 105902 |