The volume under review is based on the papers presented at the conference “Traditional Chinese Women through a Modern Lens” held at Harvard University in June 2006. Its publication marks an important milestone in the study of late imperial Chinese women. Read together with the two previous volumes of collected essays on this same topic, Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), edited by Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, and Chinese Women in the Imperial Past (Leiden: Brill, 1999), edited by Harriet Zurndorfer, this most recent volume is a testament to the impressive strides that have been made in rediscovering late imperial women's writings, reflecting how much the field has evolved during the last decade.

Quite a few books on pre-modern Chinese women have in their titles the term “inner quarters” or “inner chambers” (guige, the confined domestic space where women from the elite often found themselves): for example, Dorothy Ko's Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Patricia Ebrey's The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). While the title of this volume also uses the term, it simultaneously emphasizes the need to move our focus beyond the inner quarters in order to reach a more complete understanding of late imperial Chinese women. Among the eleven essays, only the first two, Grace Fong's “Writing and Illness: A Feminine Condition in Women's Poetry of the Ming and Qing” and Anne McLaren's “Lamenting the Dead: Women's Performance of Grief in Late Imperial China” deal with the spaces of the domestic realm. With these two essays in Part 1 serving as a nice point of departure, the next nine essays chart a conspicuous movement away from the inner quarters, as illustrated by the respective titles of the following three parts: “Part II: Larger Horizons: Editing and Its Implications,” “Part III: Beyond Prescribed Roles” and “Part IV: The Personal Is Political: Responding to the Outside World.”

The essays on women's editing activities by Ellen Widmer and Robyn Hamilton provide us with much information about how these women's visions were expanded to embrace larger horizons through their efforts as editors of anthologies of women's writings, and how this helped to instill in them the sense of a larger imagined female community. Spaces beyond the inner quarters were explicit concerns in the works of many women writers examined by Wai-yee Li, Siao-chen Hu, Susan Mann, Guotong Li, and Nanxiu Qian. These essays discuss in detail the different and unique ways in which these women writers responded to and coped with the crises of the outside world, such as dynastic transition, war, violence, and political reform. In Beata Grant's essay on “Poetic Exchanges Between Gentry Women and Buddhist Nuns,” the question of how a woman can cross the boundaries of the domestic realm is also explored at some length. Here the real-life female community of gentry women and nuns discussed by Grant forms an interesting parallel to the imagined female community illuminated in Widmer's essay.

As Fong mentions in her introduction, throughout the volume, space is a key concept intricately intertwined with that of gender, and the emphasis here is on “the gendered production of space” (p. 10). Of course, not all the spaces these women were concerned with were beyond the inner quarters. As Fong explores in her essay, women's writings on illness seem to have constructed an “alternative space” within the domestic realm that was uniquely feminine (p. 47). Besides the issue of gendered production of space, other important and related issues also receive attention from the contributors: Li discusses how self-consciously her seventeenth-century authors wrote as women (p. 213) and Widmer ponders the question of “feminine tradition” developed by her anthology editors (p. 105). Their self-awareness as female writing subjects was certainly closely related to their heightened sense of the expanded “spaces” beyond the inner quarters and part of a collective identity as writing women.

The general picture of late imperial Chinese women emerging from this volume is consequently a quite refreshing one: many of these writing women were concerned with issues that stereotypically belonged to the realm of men, such as national crises or political reforms. This should go a long way toward revising the popular view that late imperial Chinese women were prisoners of the “inner quarters” with little access to the outside world. Instead, these essays show us how often the so-called Confucian gender norms of the inner vs. outer spheres were circumvented and violated in traditional China, and that the different spaces where women found or imagined themselves to be at such moments were far more diverse than many of us had been led to believe. Furthermore, contributors such as Mann and Qian also call our attention to the interesting continuity between these guixiu writers and those “new women” figures usually associated with China's modernization at the turn of the twentieth century. In a word, this volume should contribute significantly to a more nuanced understanding of pre-modern Chinese women.