Frost in May

The Convent of the Five Wounds, where Nanda Grey is sent when she is nine, is on the edge of London--but in 1908 it is a world unto itself. For the young girls receiving a Catholic education behind its walls, religion is a nationality, conformity an entire way of life. In this intense, troubled atmosphere--caught to perfection by a superb writer--passionate friendships are the only deviation. Nanda is thirteen, a normal, quick-witted, spirited girl, when, catastrophically, she breaks the rules and pays too large a price for her transgression. First published in 1933, Frost in May has been compared by critics to Colette's Claudine a l'Ecole and to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man..