The Promise: Love and Loss in Modern China
XUE XINRAN
(I.B. Tauris, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Romantic love was never as widespread in China as in Europe. Communism branded it bourgeois and selfish, and it still faces great obstacles. For this collection of compelling autobiographies, British-Chinese author Xinran interviewed six women born between 1920 and 1988 into a well-to-do family from near Beijing. They are all unsentimental and resilient in ­ outlook.

The first, Red, born in 1920, enters an arranged marriage during the Civil War with a sense of excitement, but her husband reveals that he has long loved another woman, admitting that he married Red to please his parents. He never consummates the marriage, though they share a bed for 60 years, consoling each other by talking and reciting classical poems. Xinran links Red to generations forced to respect the crushing Three Obediences (to father before marriage, husband after, and son once widowed) and Four Virtues (propriety in behaviour, speech, demeanour and employment). In a grotesque final humiliation, her husband’s dying wish is that she provide evidence of her long-lived virginity. She is, it appears, astonishingly stoical.