Susan Mann's book concerns three literati women, whose lives are superbly reconstructed from a combination of archival research and a learned historian's creative imagination. As literary narration, it tells an engrossing saga of three generations with an abundance of fascinating details; as history, it presents a nuanced account of three individuals' life experiences set against patterns of historical change. As a whole, the book gives us insights into women's lives that literary works or academic history alone cannot achieve.

The book consists of three interlocked parts, each devoted to one woman's life, and extends from Tang Yaoqing's childhood and adult life (1763–1831), through that of her oldest daughter, Zhang Qieying (1792–1863), and ends with one of Tang's granddaughters, Wang Caipin (1826–93). The narrative begins in 1893, when a literati-official was preparing the publication of Wang Caipin's poetry. The rest of the book traces back Caipin's “family learning” through a genealogy of talented women, their life stories told through multiple strands: their own poetry and calligraphy, letters among a network of male and female family and friends, their connection to cultural debates, and their responses to the upheavals of the nineteenth century.

At the center of the narrative is a hand-scroll painting entitled “Linking Verse across Adjoining Rooms,” featuring a brother, his two sisters, and their spouses, captured at a moment of composing linked verse. While the three generations provide the historical scope, this painting focuses our attention on one moment, circa 1842, as it illustrates vividly the ideal family, a fragile ideal soon shattered by the turn of events. That this ideal family departed markedly from the conventional model—being three families connected through sibling relations and thus of three different patrilines—is at the heart of the book's argument: women played a central role in “maintaining elite status in the mobile society of the late empire” (p. 47). This role, inculcated from childhood by sibling intimacy, constituted an ideal that Zhang siblings evidently realized well after marriage.

That the painting adorning Mann's book is a modern re-creation rather than the original, no longer extant, parallels the text, a creative reconstruction that aims to give life to “people of the past with their feelings, words, and deeds intact” (p. xvi). Consequently, Mann presents much of the account from the perspective of one of the three protagonists. For example, in relating Tang Yaoqing's early education, Mann creates a scene in which Yaoqing burns a poetic composition after her father lectures her about the moral dangers of women's poetry. Although not based on archival evidence, this story warrants the considerable risk. The tale dramatizes the intense debate over women's poetry, explains why Yaoqing had no surviving poetry as a young woman, and gives full vent to the agony and strangeness of the dramatic gesture of poem burning, so frequently mentioned in prefaces to women's poetry that some scholars dismiss it as a cliché.

Mann consistently separates historical narration from her own commentary. Following the precedent of Sima Qian, after each biography and at the end of the book, we find a coda that begins with, “the Historian says … ” As in Sima Qian, we find a host of different things, from information on relevant historical events, interpretation and inference of patterns of history, judgment of individual merit, and the historian's commentary on her own methodology. In addition, in the fifty pages of notes, the author informs us precisely where she has archival evidence and where she relies on her imagination.

Using the imagination allows the historian to fill in the gaps in historical records on taboo matters such as sexuality, death, and money. In accounting for Tang Yaoqing's financial resources during her husband's absence, for example, Mann argues that Tang found a major source of money in her dowry, which Mann calls a “form of tax-free inheritance,” and further, an “insurance policy used by women to cover their female kin regardless of the patriline” (pp. 60–61). In managing this “policy,” Tang joins other elite women who “were an essential part of the masking process that shielded every scholarly family's commercial activities from view” (p. 60). This argument pieces together disparate sources, reads between the lines of these sources, and significantly extends our knowledge of women's affinal relations as developed in recent scholarship. The idea further links the silence on elite women's financial management with the praise of their frugality and generosity. Henceforth, we will no longer be able to read these words of praise without thinking of them as possible “circumlocutions to talk about [women's] use of money and profits” (p. 174), and, more generally, women's crucial role in the maintenance of class status.

This beautifully crafted study adds great depth and texture to our knowledge of women's lives in the last hundred years of the Qing empire. By improving our understanding of women's history, it also significantly alters our understanding of history in general.