Much wonderful work has been done in the past decades to discover the worlds of women in late imperial China, but no one has done more to bring those worlds to the attention of the anglophone reading public than the novelist Lisa See. Her latest book, Lady Tan's Circle of Women, has been a bestseller and has been met with wide critical acclaim, which is reported in some detail on her website, https://lisasee.com.
Lady Tan's Circle of Women is a seriously researched work of historical fiction. The book does not contain a bibliography; it is, after all, a work of fiction. But there are acknowledgments, in which See tells us that, early in the pandemic, Yi-li Wu's Reproducing Women, sitting on her bookshelf, caught her eye, as did Charlotte Furth's Flourishing Yin.1 See noted with interest the ways in which both books talked about a...
