The Empress and Mrs. Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds [Hardcover]

The story of two women from worlds that could not seem farther apartimperial China and the American Midwestwho found common ground before and after one of the greatest clashes between East and West, the fifty-five-day siege of the Beijing foreign legations known as the Boxer Uprising. Using diaries, letters and untapped sources, The Empress and Mrs. Conger traces the parallel lives of the Empress Dowager Cixi and American diplomats wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other's worlds.

The story of two women from worlds that could not seem farther apartimperial China and the American Midwestwho found common ground before and after one of the greatest clashes between East and West, the fifty-five-day siege of the Beijing foreign legations known as the Boxer Uprising. Using diaries, letters and untapped sources, The Empress and Mrs. Conger traces the parallel lives of the Empress Dowager Cixi and American diplomats wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other's worlds.

Grant Hayter-Menzies brings his talent for recreating the material, cultural and mental textures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bear on the story of Sarah Conger. He presents the reader not only a story, not only characters, but

Sarah Conger's story is worth telling for many reasons. She occupied a point in time that makes her interesting, but the author demonstrates that she is interesting in her own righta flawed and fascinating individual whose story we want to read not for

In his meticulously researched and enjoyable dissection of an unlikely relationship between two complex womenan American diplomats wife Sarah Pike Conger and Cixi, Empress Dowager of ChinaGrant Hayter-Menzies exposes many paradoxes that still characte

Hayter-Menzies takes advantage of his literary talent and cultural sensibility, tellinl³®