spine color browned. cover rub marks, creases, and edge wear. edges discolored. page corner tip wear. no marks on text.

1994 Wild Peony Pty Ltd paperback. 102 pages. 8 1/2" x 5 1/2". University of Sydney East Asian Series, no. 8.

The stories in this selection from the seventeenth century reflect a particular strain of misogynistic thinking: that women who pursue their own sexual desires have a catastrophic effect on family and society. The heroines follow the dictates of their own passions and thereby bring about the ruin of their families and of those near them. The stories, translated here for the first time into English, are also among the earliest examples of realistic fiction in China. This is the world of the inner apartments, where women of the elite resided in genteel isolation, and the thronging world of the market-places, taverns and brothels where women of the lower classes sought out their own destinies as matriarchs, concubines, matchmakers, midwives, fortune-tellers, singsong girls, healers, nuns and prostitutes.