The Chinese Garden
Rosemary Manning
The Bampfield School for Girls is housed in a crumbling country estate where ‘the physical standards (are) those of Dartmoor, the religion perverted and the games mistress a sadist’ — and where love between students is the ultimate crime. Into this world comes sixteen-year-old Rachel, a young woman who loves the round symmetries of Latin verse and the melancholy beauty of the Somerset countryside. Rachel is drawn into the conflict between two of the school’s powerful figures. On one side is the formidable headmistress who preaches the virtues of self-control while inviting young teachers into her rooms at night. On the other is Rachel’s classmate Margaret, who despises Bampfield, urges Rachel to read The Well of Loneliness, and sneaks out for trysts with her beautiful friend Rena. It is Margaret who introduces Rachel to the Chinese garden, a relic of the estate’s glory days, where the decay wrought by nature only adds to the fragile beauty of a landscape as perfect as ‘the world of a willow-pattern plate.’ Unwittingly, Rachel becomes caught in a tangle of passions she does not fully understand, and even her beloved Chinese garden becomes a pawn in a moral struggle to which all innocence will be lost.
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Details
| ISBN | 1558612157 |
| Genre | YA Fiction (Young Adult) |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Publication Date | 1962 |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 159 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Cover Artist | Germano Facetti |
| BookID | 2026 |
