A Most Immoral Woman

by Linda Jaivin

It is 1904. At the age of forty-two‚ the handsome and influential Australian George Ernest Morrison‚ Peking correspondent for The Times of London‚ is considered the most eligible Western bachelor in China. But Morrison has yet to meet his match; until one night‚ where the Great Wall meets the sea‚ he encounters Mae Perkins‚ the ravishing and free spirited daughter of a California millionaire‚ and a turbulent affair begins.
War‚ meanwhile‚ has broken out between Russia and Japan for domination over northeast China. Morrison's colleague Lionel James has an idea that will revolutionise war correspondence. But the Russians‚ the Japanese‚ and even The Times' own editor‚ it seems‚ would rather see James hung from the nearest yardarm. James believes that only Morrison can help. Just as Mae seems to be slipping away from him‚ James' quest propels Morrison into her magnetic orbit once more.

Inspired by a true story‚ A Most Immoral Woman is a surprising‚ witty and erotic tale of sexual and other obsessions set in the floating world of Westerners in China and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. At its heart stands an original and devastatingly honest woman‚ as seen from the perspective of the extraordinary man who was drawn to love her.

Genres: Book Club, Nonfiction

370 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Linda Jaivin is the author of twelve books, including the forthcoming (May 2021) The Shortest History of China and the novel The Empress Lover, published in April 2014 as well as the travel companion Beijing, published in July 2014. Other major publications include the Quarterly Essay: Found in Translation (late 2013), five novels and a novella, a collection of essays (Confessions of an S&M Virgin) and a China memoir (Monkey and the Dragon). Her first novel was the internationally bestselling comic erotic Eat Me. The Empress Lover follows A Most Immoral Woman, which is set in China and Japan in 1904 and based on a true story. She is also a translator from Chinese and a playwright. She was the winner of the 2014 New South Wales Writers Fellowship.

Reviews

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bottom Line: Linda Jaivin, is an acknowledged expert on China. She is a good story teller and an able historian with an eye for forgotten people. All of this is tossed together in A Most Immoral Woman. The result is a fair story and something of a muddle. There is legitimate history, real people, several worth making the effort to know better, some feminism mixed in with other social and literary chatter, and totaling out at not much. I like Ms. Jaivin and will not only read more of her books, but will seek out the real history on one or more of these people. 3.5 of 5 is all I will offer and I am not sure who the readership for this book should be.

A Most Immoral Woman opens with the introduction of Australian born George Morrison. Note: Authoress Jaivin is Australian. He is the Peking Correspondent and something of the area manager for the London Times. The Russo-Japanese’s war is under way and he wants in. Especially as he and many others will call this “his war”. Mr. Morrison is rather past his prime. His life had been one of high adventure, and high romance, both in the Victorian sense of manly men and in the Victorian underground sense of bed room conquests. (Note: All of this having a bases in history, Morrison existed)
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Early on he meets American heiress and would be adventuress Mae Perkins. She will be our Woman from the title.

Ms. Perkins also existed as the person Jaivin portrays, only we do not know how much is true and how much is fiction. Ms Jaivin has read the lady’s diaries and love letters but is coy about how much, the author has edited into the narrative.

The bulk of the text is a collection of names from this era in the Far East, a few asides about the emergence of what may have been dirty books for ladies (again hard to be certain from the book). The central conflict of the story is an interesting but rather bland. He has a list of bedroom conquests, she does too. The reversal is that he becomes the clinging lover, jealous of her bed and she is not especially clingy and not about to apologize for enjoying sex.

This is something of a “what if” story as it is not clear that these two ever met. The sex is not that sexy, the business of being a war correspondent includes some interesting glimpses into how that field was about to change but is otherwise bland. And as mentioned above other things are happening more or less remote and rarely investigated to any depth.

There is enough to keep a reader occupied and interested. For me the biggest tease was in being reminded that the author wrote a better book and this is not her at her best

[Jenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the first third, then skimmed the rest.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. It had all the building blocks for a good read but it was ultimately kind of boring and I didn't really like the characters enough to follow them through to the end. I couldn't finish it - life's too short to read books you're not enjoying.

[Lyn Haines · Rating 4 out of 5]

'It had been a strange year, this Dragon Year, full of drama, exhilaration, optimism and risk.' pg361

Meticulously researched and thoughtfully constructed, A Most Immoral Woman cleverly balances the political and social upheavals of northeast China in 1904, with a love affair between the influential correspondent for the Times Dr Morrison and the free spirited American heiress Mae Perkins.

For those who like their historical fiction with a splash of wit and pinch of eroticism.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a little beauty

[Lakmus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh, this is hard. This was picked by a bookclub, so outside my normal reading choices.

Overall an entertaining adventure that vaguely reminded me of the Fandorin books I read as a kid (still would prefer the Fandorin, though). The book kept reaching for the 'almost good' but then getting derailed by petty melodrama, time and time again. I thought that was the point, for a bit, but in the end it seems like it amounted to nothing and a solid 40% of it was like a Brazilian soap opera my grandmother watched.

I do think it'd be good as a black comedy period drama – on one hand we have the realities of war, early 20th century China and plenty of room for serious social/political commentary, on the other, as soon as Miss Perkins appears everything descends into a farce, the real world forgotten. Foreigners obsessed with their own petty affairs and having the option to forget what's going on, because ultimately, for them it's only a juicy story to report for the newspapers and they have their rose-tinted Australia to fantasize about in a moment of nostalgia.

Which is a pity, because as I realised when I read the acknowledgements, these were all mostly real people, and Morrison's Wikipedia page paints a somewhat more interesting picture than the ageing colonialist adventurer that we get.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some lovely descriptive writing in this book but it is counter -balanced by the story. It is set in a time of war where actual news is frustratingly scarce for the war correspondents haunting the country. The main character does not hesitate to abandon what he should be doing job-wise. As far as Mae was concerned he was “conquered territory, carrying nothing but white flags”. The morality and hypocrisy of the times was somewhat interesting, but my interest flagged.

[Rae Stanton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy read set in 1904 China. I enjoyed the sights and sounds!

[Jo Alcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note, I'm stingy with stars.

I liked it.

I enjoy looking up new and vaguely familiar words. Linda Jaivin's novel, A Most Immoral Woman, provided a feast: a fug of wood, long past the climacteric, chatoyant eyes, soap and carbolic, voluble service for the poor, miscegenation, recovered her natural ebullience, enceintes, celerity, hustling rickshas, broughams, and drays, with a trilby, parquet, eiderdown, escritoire, hock with their fish, was in a choler, gangs of tatterdemalions, gored skirt, busk, magnificently buxom and callipygian form, thickets of swag, salt-bush and mallee, V-shaped stomacher, and panniers, cotillions and lawn parties, godowns hove into view, blancmange, orchitis, and worse. Thirty examples should suffice.

What attracted me to the novel in the first place was the old China connection. That Jaivin was a C-E translator, iow, someone who might actually know something about the Chinese language, meant I had to check it out. When I discovered the erotica connection...Ah, icing on the cake. Old China and sex, irresistible.

It was interesting how much, or how little, really, Jaivin embedded Chinese expressions in her text, and I couldn't help but feel ashamed at how heavy-handed and unnecessary my own approach had been. Good lesson there. I was also impressed how good a job she did inventing authentic sounding names. Or, so I thought. 'Lionel James', for example, was reminiscent of James Legge (1815-1897) and Lionel Giles (1875-1958). The former was a great translator of the Chinese classics, the latter a translator of Sunzi's Art of War, and the Analects of Confucius, and son of the Herbert Giles, of Wade-Giles Romanization system fame. (Hmm, I have Herbert's famous dictionary within arm's reach at my desk.) In addition to well-chosen English names, Jaivin's transcription of Chinese names instantly brought to mind old Manchu and early Republican China. So I was disappointed when I found out in the penultimate chapter, a sort of colophon, that Lionel James was an actual person. I didn't want to be reminded so concretely of the history after having given the author kudos throughout for doing such a convincing job of mixing and matching English names, and subtly distorting Chinese names to reflect dialect or old spellings (e.g., HaiMun for the ship's name), all in the service of conjuring China at the end of the 19th century. I would have preferred she cut the last chapter, or reduce it to a footnote.

The writing was a pleasure to read. If it had been more finely balanced with a better (psychological) plot, and the last chapter cut, mellowed by a sip or two of Bourbon, I'd given it four stars. Excellent writing, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, but the story stayed pretty much on an even keel, neither rising high nor sinking deep. Although I often found myself smiling at his naivete, I didn't feel Morrison suffer because of it. Although I found myself saying, Yes, yes, that's how it is! when seeing Miss Perkin's choose repeated re-entry into the realm of the senses, at some point, I would have liked to watch her wrestle with a big contradiction or two. In both characters, the surface was well represented, but the depths remained unplumbed. Perhaps I ask too much, old age and all, with a heart that's black and a skin that thick. 心黑皮厚.

Went on to read Eat Me.

[Lisa Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Jaivan is best known (by me, anyway) for her erotic comedy. Since reading Eat Me in the mid-nineties, I get a tingle every time I go into the supermarket fruit section. Those who associate Jaivan with raunch may not know that she is also a serious scholar of all things Chinese. A Most Immoral Woman brings together her two diverse talents.
This well researched story is set in the ‘floating world’ of foreigners in China in the early 1900s and based on real people and events. It gives an insight into a part of history I knew little about – the war between Japan and Russia for control of Manchuria. And then, of course, there’s the sex…
Jaivan tells the story from the point of view of the Australian war journalist, ‘Morrison of Peking’. The ‘most immoral woman’ in question is Mae Perkins, an American heiress. Maisie, as Morrison calls her, is a free spirit who takes and discards men as she pleases. Morrison battles to resist Mae’s charms, but even her frank admission that she spreads her favours widely can’t quench his ardour. Maisie boasts that the Captain of her ship kissed her all the way from Honolulu to Peking. In telling Morrison this, she sets him a challenge; ‘kiss’ being a euphemism for her favourite form of pleasure...
Written in overblown prose which mirrors that of the period, the book offers up a myriad of sights, sounds and smells. ‘Shanghai, with its steamy, moist exhalations, was yin. A woman, and a loose one at that. Anyone could have her.’
Morrison was a trifle dull as a character, but perhaps that was true to his nature. The exuberant Maisie was much more fun. And she alone questioned her society’s focus on sexual morality, while the ethics of a war in which so many died went un-noted.
While erotica and history is a not uncommon mix, Linda Jaivan gives it her own stamp. So is it naughty? Yes, but far from the graphic detail of Eat Me. I found A Most Immoral Woman to be a witty and sexy romp through history.

[Ian Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am still uncertain about George and Mae!Were they totally irresponsible or lucky to have met one another given their strong "chemistry".I admired Mae's honesty to some extent, plus her viewpoint about the suffering of war-perhaps even her desire for freedom of choice and not to be confined in life like a caged bird....
I very much liked the character of Kuan(Morrison's"boy")He was aware of the necessity of changing China's future away from the unjust present.I believe he made Morrison aware of this and I liked the polite,subtle,way he did so!
The backdrop of the Russo-Japanese war added a lot of interest to the book.Morrison ceretainly had a wonderful adventurous life for a boy who started life in Geelong!
The author made one mistake.Morrison walked from Normanton to Melbourne,not Adelaide(see the Australian Dictionary of Biography)He walked from Geelong to Adelaide on an earlier occasion.
It would be interesting to know which parts of the novel rearding Mae and George were factual.....

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating story based on true events, the story is told from the point of view of the real life G E Morrison who had an adventurous life even before he fell hopelessly in love with Mae Perkins, an independent and sexually promiscuous American heiress. Set in China in 1904 at the beginning of the Russo Japanese War the vivid descriptions of life in China are compelling. Accounts of the on-off relationship between Mae and Morrison are sometimes funny, sometimes tedious. Was he really that gullible and easily manipulated?

[Angela Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

When war broke out in northern China, The Times reporter, Morrison (based in Beijing) is, at 42, ready to seek a bride. Mae Perkins appears like a mirage and sweeps him off his feet. This nymphomaiac, of 26, is the heir of millions and a distraction which awards a new angle on the tale of an historic period, between 1903 - 5 and the battle between Russia and Japan.

[Milissa Deitz]

My favourite sort of book - a literary page turner! I missed the main characters when I'd finished... found myself wondering what they were doing.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

So far, making a good man look bad ...

[Riem · Rating 4 out of 5]

China, Japan, politics, British at their most licentious at the turn of the 20th Century. As they say in the movies - based on a true story.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent book. think George Morrison was a great Australian who achieved much in a hostile and remote part of the world.
I learnt Linda Jaivin can write!!!

[Donnelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh. Found it difficult to be sympathetic to the characters.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was bored of heaving feminine parts and pompous men, that seemed to achieve little. In saying that I am not a huge fan "romance" novels, especially historical ones that involve simpering females.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I became a bit bored with this book at times. Interesting because it's based on real characters. Set in China after the Boxer Rebellion, so I found the historical background interesting.

[SuzAnne King · Rating 4 out of 5]

... interesting insights on Kellogg's cornflakes, but I did learn of some new historical persons to look up.

[Kevin]

Reads like a novel, however this is a great story of fact that you could not invent. A bigger than life Australian involved in China covering life and the wars that would shape the world to come. 5 Stars