I’ll Take a Scholar for a Husband

Shen Tangning was born a daughter of a marquis and spent her early years guarding the frontier with her parents. But after returning to the capital, she became someone the capital’s noblewomen wanted nothing to do with, simply because she was far too “unconventional.”

While all the noblewomen in the capital read The Rules for Women and The Admonitions for Women, she studied The Art of War and the Strange Gates and Hidden Armor. While they practiced needlework, music, chess, calligraphy, and painting, she trained with swords, spears, staves, and clubs. While they gathered for garden parties beneath their skirted canopies, she rode through the streets on horseback. She did everything ordinary women were not supposed to do!

Her father spent three years trying to find her a match, to no avail. Matchmakers practically trampled the doorsteps of other families, but few dared to visit his household, afraid it would ruin their reputations.

Shen Tangning comforted her father: at worst, she could find a live-in son-in-law! With her looks and abilities, surely she could find at least one?

Then one day, while riding through the streets, she failed to rein in a spooked horse and accidentally knocked someone down in an alley. Shen Tangning saw the person lying on the ground, brows slightly furrowed, collar and hair fluttering in the breeze.

What a handsome scholar, so pitiful and appealing!

She brought him home and, after wearing him down with every possible argument, finally got her wish and secured an engagement.

Little did she know that a marriage contract would bind two equally proud and clever hearts, while also drawing them into the court’s shifting, perilous political struggles.

I originally planned to pitch this story as a short drama, but I’ve only ever written novels, never short dramas. So what came out was something that was neither quite a short drama nor quite a novel. The pitch didn’t make it, but since the story already exists, I thought I’d share it for everyone to enjoy.