The Chinese saying shi nian mo yi jian, “taking ten years to sharpen a sword,” suitably applies to the decade during which Yan Haiping completed this monograph, which is more than just an addition to the increasing number of academic studies on pre-1949 Chinese women writers and feminism. Carefully written and deliberated, the book explores the “revolutionary feminist legacy” manifested—or, in Yan's words “bodied forth”—in writing as well as in the life passages of some of the major modern Chinese women writers. The “feminist imagination” thus focused is a key notion that is central to the author's analyses, which intersect writings with lives that existed in the “force fields” of the complex and violent times of the first half of the twentieth century.
In addition to the familiar Euro-American liberal feminist positions of placing women's writings and lives against nationalism or revolution so as to critique how women's interests...
