In August 1900, 570 women in Tongzhou committed suicide to escape capture and rape by troops of the Joint Expeditionary Force, an international force formed to suppress the Boxer Rebellion. As noted by Joan Judge in part three of The Precious Raft of History, this mass tragedy could be viewed as an act of female virtue consistent with the tradition of “heroic chastity martyrdom.” In fact, it was interpreted in a number of ways. Judge points to three different approaches, of which one was a frank repudiation of female suicide as anything to celebrate (He Xiangning), while another was an analysis of the suicides in terms of male valour rather than of female virtue (Jin Xia). Even the writer who hailed the suicides in terms of traditional feminine virtue (Shimoda Utako) also pointed to better uses to which the practice of virtue could be put: in brief, women should learn to “love their nation as they loved their own bodies” (p. 184).

Such viewpoints were not private opinions entered in diaries but public statements made by activist women who wrote for overseas student journals or progressive women's magazines, such as Magazine of the New Chinese Woman. On the basis of such materials, read alongside illustrated biographies, textbooks, official documents and collected writings, Judge has written an unusual and thoughtful book about women's biographies in a time of change. The genre is a hallowed one in China. Judge divides her study into three parts: “The regime of feminine virtue”; “History, nation and female talent”; and “New global hierarchies of female heroism.” More clearly than the names of the individual chapters, the names of the three parts provide a sense of the historically-formed nested hierarchy of social contexts – family, nation, world – within which women's lives were recorded. In each part she explores the tensions between old and new ways of writing women's lives, drawing on a rich corpus of scholarship on early biographies for a comparative viewpoint that establishes the distinctiveness of turn-of the-century writings. As suggested by the title of parts two and three, this distinctiveness was apparent in preoccupations with the nation and engagement with the outside world.

Change in this period was evident in the processes of secularization, globalization and temporalization, which Judge takes as constituting modernity. Of these three processes, temporalization is arguably the most significant for her analysis. The book's title, The Precious Raft of History, points to the cornerstone of her methodology, which is an assessment of where the past stands in relationship to the present in the case of any particular writer or work. Since biography is a significant mode of history in the Chinese literary tradition, the “precious raft” not only carried the past to which women writers and activists in the early 20th-century frequently referred, but was continually restocked as new biographies were written or even imported from the West.

The analysis of the biographical writings is organized around four chronotypes: eternalist, meliorist, archeomodern and presentist. These cover a spectrum of approaches to past and present, ranging from the using the (golden) past to criticize the present at one extreme to rewriting the past on the basis of a vision of the future at the other (pp. 12–13). It is not always easy to keep the types in mind, but one can see why Judge has adopted the device: it has helped her to plot out the different positions of writers with co-ordinates that not only show the changing characteristics of the female exemplar in the Chinese world view, but serve to differentiate new configurations of exemplar from each other. In the example of the Tongzhou suicides, “Shimoda's [meliorist] concern was to nationalize women's chastity,” while the “presentist” Jin Xia anachronistically read the Tongzhou virtuous suicides as acts of masculine courage (p. 185).

As Judge shows, many of the biographical categories of imperial times lend themselves to the inclusion of modern biographies. In other words, there were talented women in the past, and also in the present. But the figure of the talented woman was by no means the same in antiquity as in the present. In the early 20th century “new normative parameters” (p. 81) had to be established for praiseworthy feminine qualities and accomplishments. The consequence was not a seamless transition in Chinese womanhood but some rather sharp ruptures, epitomized by the “social category of the female student” (p. 61) with her progressive values. These students were actually “women warriors” of a new sort. They used the pen rather than the sword, acted co-operatively rather than individually, and were inspired by loyalty not to parents, family or emperor, but rather to China (p. 198). New parameters for praiseworthy women made it difficult to retain all the old female exemplars. In particular, it became difficult to praise women who followed their husbands to the grave, or mutilated themselves for reasons to do with chastity or filiality. Thus, while female exemplars continued to be produced, women's biographies from this period show significant changes in how they were constructed.

In her introduction, Judge discusses the book's engagement with the concept of modernity. Her concluding chapter, which examines three “turn-of-the-twenty-first-century” figures, illuminates the modernity of the moment a century earlier when the past, always a matter of intense interest to educated people in China, was subjected to a range of novel treatments at the hands of a new generation of writers. This generation included many women writers, and it is one of the achievements of the book that so many of their names have now been imported into English-language scholarship. In contrast to the early 21st century, the early 20th century has in recent years been the subject of relatively few books in English. Yet this was a remarkable period. Judge's study of the “woman question” does justice to its dynamism, complexity and transitional character. She has established a new benchmark in historical studies of the very late Qing.