Inner Quarters and Beyond

Grace S. Fong (Ph.D. 1984, University of British Columbia) is Professor of Chinese Literature at McGill University. She has published extensively on classical Chinese poetry and women's writings in the Ming and Qing dynasties including Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008)Ellen Widmer (Ph.D. 1981, Harvard) is Professor of Chinese Studies at Wellesley College. She has published numerous articles on late imperial Chinese women, as well as a monograph entitled The Beauty and The Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth Century China (Harvard 2006).

“This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.”Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).'..this volume is a most welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on women and women's writing in the late imperial era. The essays are uniformly well researched and well written and unusually well cohesive in mutually reinforcing the argument for the social and political significance of women's writings long before the May Fourth Movement.'Paul S. Ropp, Clark University, China Review International, 18 (2011)