Herself an Author

Grace S. Fong is associate professor of Chinese literature at McGill University.

Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study."" —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism; ""In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the sensualities, pains, satisfactions, and sadness of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Professor Fong—a superb translator of Chinese poetry, prose, and criticism—has rendered the works of these women in a way that is true both to our theoretical concerns and theirs."" -Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding; ""Professor Fong approaches the poetry of Ming-Qing upper-class women as a social-cultural activity that allowed these women to manifest their agency and assert their own subjectivity against the background of virtual and actual networks of fellow female poets. As the distillation of more than ten years of research by one of the leading scholars in this field, this work is a timely contribution that eminently deserves our attention. Given the inclusion of translations of some of the texts discussed, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to the reading of women’s poetry of the Ming-Qing period."" —Wilt Idema, Harvard University; ""As always with Professor Fong’s work, the strengths of [this book] lie in her lucid and jargon-free writing, and her commitment, shown through her years of careful archival research, to expanding our knowledge of the range of late imperial women’s writings and practices of writing. Professor Fong has honoured her subjects and graced us readers with the rare privilege of hearing these women speak in their own voices."" —Pacific Affairs; ""Fong is a sophisticated and careful reader, and she has written a literary history which is author-centered, which addresses the question ‘Why did she write poetry?’ rather than ‘How good is this poem?’ The audience for this terrific book should include not just scholars interested in Chinese women and literature, but those interested in questions of why people write and why people read. Not only has Grace Fong found new texts for us, she is showing us new ways of reading them."" —Journal of Chinese Studies; ""Takes the discussion in an exciting new direction. . . . The greatest contributions of this book . . . are the introductions of various women writers and the translations into English of their compositions, many discovered by the author and not heretofore translated into English. . . . Essential."" —Choice