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Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning ill. Constance Marshall (illustrator)

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 15 Jan 2025

Publisher: Penguin Random House Children’s UK
ISBN: 9780241761632

My first three children’s books (the “dragon books”) were written for Sue, the small daughter of a friend, Perhaps this gives them a personal quality which comes out in the relationship between the dragon and Sue, and accounts for their popularity. Arripay. an historical novel, was also written for Sue. when she was somewhat older. The other children’s books were all commissioned.
I must confess that my adult fiction means a great deal more to me. I doubt if I shall write more children’s books, but I have returned to adult novel-writing after a long absence.

Manning, writing introductory comments for Twentieth Century Children’s Writers (1978).

Green Smoke was first published in 1957.

Rediscover this magical story of a little girl and the dragon she finds in a cave in Cornwall, in this classic reissue.

‘She heard a noise very like a loud sneeze, and a little puff of green smoke came out of the cave and floated away into the air.’

On holiday in Cornwall, while exploring along the coastline, Susan discovers something something quite different from anything she had ever seen before. It would be more polite to call him Someone rather than Something. Out of a cave comes a green scaly dragon, with yellow horns and a charming smile…

Rosemary Joy Manning (9 December 1911 – 15 April 1988) was a British writer of both adult and children’s books. Aside from her popular Dragon children’s series, her best-known novel is The Chinese Garden, an important British lesbian novel. She was also wrote under the pseudonyms Sarah Davys and Mary Voyle.

Manning’s entry in The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English says that her “historical novel for teenagers, Arripay, bears comparison with the best of the then critically acclaimed genre. Set in medieval Dorset it tells the storey of Adam for whom neither the monastery nor privateering holds any attraction. Its theme is the courage to be yourself, a theme that also characterises Manning’s adult fiction.” I was not aware of Arripay and would be interested to hear from anyone who has read it or, indeed, if it was ever reissued.

Manning’s entry in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature is a perfunctory 4 lines in length and my impression is that her children’s books, either when first published or since, had little impact outside of the UK. I’m happy to stand corrected on that.

Of the illustrator, Constance Marshall, there appears to be little biographical information available. 

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