The Romance of a Literatus and His Concubine in Seventeenth-Century China

The explosion of writing by and about women during the Ming and Qing dynasties in China has been the topic of dissertations, research monographs, anthologies, reference works, databases, and translations for decades.¹ But there is still much work left to be done. One rich set of sources about the lives of literate women during the late imperial era are the memoirs written by the literate men in their lives. While these accounts are mediated through the voices of male writers, they are often the only records we have of the intimate lives of women who otherwise would have largely been lost to history.² This is why we should welcome the recent publication of The Romance of a Literatus and His Concubine in Seventeenth-Century China, a meticulously annotated and beautifully rendered translation by Jun Fang and Lifang He of Yingmeian yiyu 影梅庵憶語 (Reminiscences of the plum-shaded convent), a...