Bound for glory

FOR her new novel, "Peony in Love," Lisa See mines an intriguing vein of Chinese history. When the opera "The Peony Pavilion" was written in 1598, the story fascinated and shocked on many levels. It was openly sensual, even sexual, but more than that, it introduced a new kind of heroine, the spirited Liniang. Contrary to the mores surrounding the life of women, she follows her heart in matters of love and dies as a result -- and then is magically resurrected.

History and the abundant writings by women of the time tell us that some young girls were so taken with Liniang's radical choice that they became "lovesick maidens," so obsessed with the opera and the personal freedom it preached that they starved themselves rather than confront arranged marriages and the limitations of being wives and daughters-in-law. In a society in which feelings, especially women's, were as restricted as their foot-bound movement, these girls wrested control in the only way they knew. Weaving fact and fiction into a dense romantic tapestry of time and place as she meditates on the meaning of love, the necessity of self-expression and the influence of art, See tells the story of one such maiden, Peony, and her desperate bid for identity.

At 16, Peony sees the opera for the first time (albeit from behind a lattice screen where women are hidden from male view) when her father stages it at her lavish palace home. Overcome by the emotional story, she wanders to the gardens, where she encounters a young man similarly enraptured by the opera. They exchange heated notions of love and quickly fall for each other. But their relationship is doomed because their marriages to others have long since been arranged. Despairing of her loveless future and filled with opera-inspired passion -- not to mention her own burgeoning desire to have her voice heard -- Peony begins to write furiously about her response to the opera. In her mania, she loses all interest in everything, including eating, and starves herself to death.