The novella purports to be an autobiographical manuscript handed to the editor by an 84-year-old retired teacher, Helene Engel, shortly before she committed suicide.
The "manuscript" itself describes the bizarre education and socialisation of a young girl, Hidalla, in two boarding establishments, the first co-educational, the second all-female.
At the age of seven Hidalla is placed in a coffin-like crate and transferred to the "park", a location that is both idyllic and hermetically sealed by high walls, where she spends the next seven years, learning only gymnastics, dance and music.
In the first, the children inhabit a utopia, an alternative childhood, where "a bodily culture of the senses is set against the mind as the source of illusion".
[6] More recently, the singer Marianne Faithfull has described it as "a fairy tale that morphs into something far more grotesque – a psycho-sexual Expressionist fable".