Book
The Dreams of Fair Women
First published 1993
In nineteenth-century Hong Kong, Milly Smith is the daughter of a powerful businessman whose world of trade and privilege is threatened by piracy, slavery and the violence surrounding Britain’s expansion in China. Her encounter with the pirate Eli Boggs pulls her away from the protected life intended for her and into the maritime frontier on which fortunes are being made.
The Opium Wars provide the larger historical setting, linking Hong Kong’s rapid growth to military force, commerce and contested sovereignty. Cordell combines romance with seafaring adventure while keeping the inequalities of the colonial port visible. Milly’s choices place personal freedom beside the coercive systems of trade and empire that have created her family’s wealth, making the novel both an adventure and a critique of the world that sustains it.
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