At the tender age of eight, Eastern Jewel peeps in fascination from behind a screen as her lusty father seduces a fourteen-year-old servant with bound feet. Peculiar feelings are aroused in the unruly girl, who by the end of her life will have spied professionally on politicians, members of the Shanghainese underworld and the last emperor Pu Yi himself, and lived out her sexual fantasies with men (and women) all over the Far East. The daughter of Prince Su's last concubine, Eastern Jewel is an intoxicating heroine - a feisty, rebellious woman who refuses to accept mutely the docile, subservient role that early twentieth-century Chinese society prescribes for her. Her thirst for excitement and controversy sees her banished as a child from her beloved mother's protection to live with distant relatives in Tokyo. She grows to adore vibrant Japan, but her insatiable appetites naturally lead her into trouble, and this time the punishment is harsher - a sojourn in bleak, freezing Mongolia and a forced marriage to a highly unsuitable husband. And all this before she is twenty, with the real dramas of her life still to come. Eastern Jewel craves freedom and will not be pinned down by anyone, least of all a man. And yet, though she seeks out experiences unlike other women's, and influence beyond the reach of most men, there remains a gaping absence in her heart, a place haunted at night by troubling thoughts. Seductive, racy and completely original, The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel is an eye-opening and gripping re-telling of the real life of a fascinating but contradictory woman, a heroine who battled to juggle her extraordinary public life with her private paper demons.
Title: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel
Author: Maureen Lindley
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2008
Number of pages: 288
ISBN: 9780747591160
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