Recent decades have witnessed increased scholarly attention focused on women writers and their roles in the dynastic changes of Chinese history, but most of the focus has been on the Han Chinese women. After calling attention to peasant women's ballads written in “women's script” (nüshu) in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province, Wilt L. Idema completed another project to show the variety and richness of women's works. His book Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets: An Anthology introduces poems written by a specific group of women poets—the Manchus—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offering fascinating insights into the everyday world of highly literate Manchu women and their mindset, thereby substantially enriching our understanding of both their contribution to Qing literature and the processes of their self-positioning in society.
Idema introduces the work of twenty talented Manchu women poets whose lives and poems have been largely neglected in the English-language...
