Pearl Buck adds one more beautiful and notable woman to the gallery of women in her novels. This time it is Peony, sold as a child into a rich house in China, brought up as a bondmaid, one who is more than a servant, less than a daughter. She grows into a provocative and lovely girl and she falls in love with the only son of the house. But tradition forbids her to be his wife. How she deals with her love, how she controls her destiny—and his too—make the story.

The setting and the essential meaning of the novel are true to history. Much of what happens in these pages did actually happen about a hundred years ago in old China. Yet history is here enriched and enlivened by the quick wit, the delicate perceptions, the profound warmth of an exquisite Chinese girl, who in her own fashion chose love above all the other gifts that life might have given her.

From the dust jacket