Akbar at the height of his power, seen from inside the harem and the council chamber alike: the emperor who could not read building a capital, a religion and an empire, and the women whose lives are decided by his moods. Steel spent twenty-two years in India as an official's wife, learned Punjabi, inspected girls' schools and collected the folk tales; she wrote the Mughal court from the sources and from a knowledge of the country that almost no English novelist had.