The Binding Chair

by Harrison, Kathryn

• ISBN13: 9781568951393
• ISBN10: 1568951396
• Edition: Large
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc

Summary

Beautiful, charismatic, destructive, May escapes an arranged marriage in rural nineteenth-century China for life in a Shanghai brothel. Arthur, a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, calls on May not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself immediately and helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet. Reforming May is out of the question, so love-struck Arthur marries her instead and brings her home to live with him, his sister and brother-in-law, and their two girls, Alice and Cecily. In Alice, May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for a child she has lost. It is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds.

By turns shocking, exquisite, and hilarious, The Binding Chair is another spellbinding literary triumph by the writer whose work Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has called "powerful and hypnotic".

Table of Contents

Apprenticeship	1	(9)
The Czar's Clock	10	(16)
The Binding Chair	26	(10)
Construction Train	36	(14)
Twice Thwarted	50	(17)
Apparitions	67	(6)
The View from the Gardener's Back	73	(14)
The Short History of a Prodigy	87	(8)
A Long-Handied Spoon	95	(15)
Seance	110	(10)
A Weakness for Russian Officers	120	(19)
A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society	139	(15)
Adventure and Arrest	154	(11)
A Search Undertaken	165	(4)
Bright, Worthless Coins	169	(16)
The Year of the Foot Tax	185	(19)
The Cure for Lisping	204	(11)
Discipline for Girls	215	(14)
Ten-in-One	229	(5)
Justice Served	234	(8)
Dolly Cleans House	242	(11)
Circumnavigation	253	(8)
Heroes of the Great War	261	(18)
Syntax and Symmetry	279	(10)
Spanish Influenza	289	(11)
Drink the Water	300	(9)
The Pipe Dreams of a Rat	309	(10)
The Head of the Family	319