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Rich and beautiful, Lilian Grey is alone in the world but for a distant cousin who works in the mission field. It is the 1890s, and beautiful heiresses are expected to marry well and stay at home, but Lilian, determined to chart her own course, asks to accompany her cousin to her remote mission station in western China.

It is not long before Lilian does indeed marry, but not before she has shown on several occasions a strength of character that no-one believes she possesses – a trait that she is obliged to draw on once again when the scandalmongers of Shanghai’s expatriate community cause her husband’s secret finally to be revealed.

Set against the uneasy atmosphere of pre-Boxer rebellion China, the author of Mother Darling (1885), a polemical novel on the rights of married women, uses her intimate knowledge of expatriate life in China to examine attitudes towards race, culture, and women’s work.

A Marriage in China was first published in 1896 by F V White & Co, London.

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