Arranged Companions: Marriage and Intimacy in Qing China by Weijing Lu

An analysis of marriage and expectations.

All sorts of things. Poetry, written about wives, exchanged between wife and husband during separations, discussions of poetry between them, the way marriages were arranged, whether they might know each other first, how locally, the effect of having to pass the examinations and the poverty before a post, the effects of rising expectations on making marriages that would have been adequate before more miserable, polygamy being basically expected of all well-off men, and all the in-law troubles of China.