Chinese mandarin households are virtually unknown in the United States except to a handful of scholars. Pearl Buck's best-selling novels dealt mostly with peasants. Historians and journalists have neglected the aristocrats for the most part….

With such a gaping hole in the popular literature, it is no wonder that Bette Bao Lord's historical novel "Spring Moon" comes as a delightful surprise. Using the story of the Changs of Suzhou, a centuries-old clan of scholar-landowners, she has delivered the details of appropriate rituals, beliefs and cultural trappings of Confucian conformity and character with an attractive abundance. The family's orderly search for knowledge, inner serenity and profits serves as an indelible reminder of a way of life that has very nearly vanished. (p. 15)

Despite the growing firestorm of Chinese history, a deftly sketched but compelling backdrop against which Mrs. Lord plots Spring Moon's survival, the author's chief concern is with...