The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period

This book presents a comprehensive portrait of the lives of women in Sung China (960-1279 AD). The author explores such topics as marriage, dowries, rites and celebrations, women's work, husband-wife relations, motherhood, widowhood, concubines, and match-making. Because of the need to rely on written materials for much of the information, and because literacy was restricted mainly to the educated and upper classes, the book naturally contains many more details about the lives of rich women than of the poor. Nevertheless, Ebrey was still able to distill some information about peasant women and families as well. The book will appeal to anyone interested in women's studies, Chinese history, or Asian area studies.

Not quite up to expectations.

The prose is extremely dry and dull, and the book plods along with page after page of facts and quotes and utterly fails to engage the reader in any way. I have sampled several chapters and it is all like this. One would say that this is “for the academic reader” rather than the general public, but I feel this sort of comment would be unfair as even scholars deserve some pleasure from their reading material, whereas this simply drones on and on like a dull dinner companion. I think that Patricia Ebrey totally lacks the gift of narrative.Compare this to “China” by Michael Wood where every page was a pleasure and one constantly came upon unexpected information and human stories full of warmth and empathy even though they were separated from us by a thousand years, stories that made one feel so close to the people of that distant era, and this particular tome comes across as completely lacking in grace and elegance by comparison.If I had not picked it up months after buying it, so that it was way beyond the return window, I think this would have gone straight back to Amazon.