Peony in Love

Name: Peony in Love
Rating: 4 (1020 reviews)

by Lisa See

First published 2007

Amazon

4.0(1,020)

Seventeenth-century China, after the Manchu conquest has ended the Ming dynasty. Peony is the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family and is already promised in marriage when a private performance of Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion awakens desires she cannot express. A concealed encounter with a young man deepens her identification with the opera’s lovesick heroine and leads her towards self-starvation.

After death, Peony remains attached to the household and to the unfinished literary record of women’s lives. She becomes connected to the successive wives of the man she loved and to their collaborative commentary on The Peony Pavilion. Combining historical fiction with the Chinese afterlife, the novel examines arranged marriage, female authorship and the ways women preserve one another’s words in early Qing society.