In Burying the Beloved, Amy Motlagh examines the complex relationship between literature and Iranian law regarding women's rights and social status. Motlagh argues the importance of reform-minded literature throughout several critical periods of social and legal change in Iranian history. Beginning with the Constitutional Revolution in 1905 through the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Motlagh investigates influential works of fiction and poetry and explores how they have affected the lives of female Iranians. Motlagh uses marriage as the central metaphor around which both law and fiction evolve. With this in mind, she explores the political and social climates of a slowly modernizing Iran through the lens of oppressed women. One of the works she examines, Her Eyes, inspired both legal and social reform by challenging Iranian norms surrounding marriage and female domesticity. Motlagh suggests that the identities of female characters in popular Iranian literature are indicative of the real status of women. She also explores the influence of an increasingly attractive culture of realism, with prominent authors reimagining notions of “the real,” on a stubbornly traditional Iran. Motlagh concludes that modern Iran, particularly the social status of modern Iranian women, is heavily influenced by the prominent reform literature of the twentieth century.