The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

"It’s set in the Qing dynasty, mostly in the 19th century, and it tries to bring to life the experiences of the women of a single family. One of the challenges of biographies of women in different settings is the limited records that are left of their lives. But with these particular women, they wrote a lot of poetry, and Mann uses that to great effect. She also experiments with the form of writing. She’s doing something that in Chinese would be called waishi , which means ‘unconventional history’. As Mann describes it, it records things that might have happened, based on invented or unauthenticated sources or on gossip. So she takes what these women wrote, and then she tries to weave fully textured lives around them, drawing on everything that could possibly help to illuminate their lives. These were elite women – but the fact that they were women also makes them one of the groups that gets left out of the historical record. Not particularly. But there was a tendency until recently for historical writing about most parts of the world to focus largely on male experiences. I think that with China there’s a special challenge, in that a lot of the general works don’t capture how variegated the lives were of women of different social groups, different classes, even different periods. There’s a tendency to think about an unchanging oppression of Chinese women. But one of the things this book captures is the degree to which women of elite groups, and in particular parts of the country, would be much more literate, much more engaged with the life of the mind than is sometimes imagined when there’s this focus purely on the patriarchal structures that kept women down. There are a lot of similarities. The Death of Woman Wang is a book which I frequently teach, and it was one of the first books I read as a student when it first came out in the late 1970s. It’s one of the books that inspired me to become a Chinese historian, and it’s a lovely work. Spence takes a woman who only shows up in the record through one incident – a crime – so he has to take much greater liberties than Susan Mann, who’s dealing with women who left more traces of themselves to be used as building blocks. But there’s definitely a kinship between the books. Mann’s book also draws on China’s long and well-established tradition of biographical writing. One way she tries to bring the reader into China is not just through Chinese lives, but also by adapting some of the forms of Chinese biographical and historical writing. It’s a tradition that goes back to Sima Qian in the first century BC, who is sometimes spoken of as the Chinese Herodotus or the Chinese Thucydides, and who interspersed accounts of great events with accounts of individuals."