The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China by Ronald Egan

Reviewed by: The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China by Ronald Egan Grace S. Fong Ronald Egan. The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Pp. xi + 422. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0674726697. Ronald Egan's book on Li Qingzhao is an immense work of peerless scholarship and erudition that should single-handedly right the balance in the heretofore-meager fare of English-language publications on the subject. Given Li Qingzhao's 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155) stature as China's most celebrated woman poet, the dearth of English scholarship on her life and writing is indeed surprising. As Egan notes in the Introduction, the lack of scholarly work in the West is striking when contrasted to the steady stream of hundreds of modern biographical and critical studies in Chinese on Li Qingzhao's life and poetry published from the Republican period (1911–1949) to the present. After two thin monographs on her life and works published in the 1960s,1 interest in Li Qingzhao in the Western world turned to translating her small surviving corpus of song lyrics (ci 詞)—long admired as consummate masterpieces of the genre—for general readers of poetry. In addition to at least three complete translations in English and two in French, selections of her ci and other writings have been translated for many anthologies of Chinese poetry and, of course, Chinese women's poetry.2 I count only two studies of [End Page 402] note focusing on Li Qingzhao in English scholarship: The first is Stephen Owen's 1986 revisionist reading of Li's famous autobiographical postface or afterword (houxu 後序) written for the Catalog of Inscriptions on Metal and Stone (Jinshi lu 金石錄) of her deceased husband, Zhao Mingcheng 趙明 誠 (1081–1129), included in his collection of seminal essays on the cultural facets of memory in historical China;3 the second is Timothy Wixted's 1994 article, in which he marshals historical comments on Li Qingzhao's poetry to demonstrate that there was not a separate female literary tradition in China in her time (or later), and that neither did Li Qingzhao draw on earlier women's poetry as models nor did her poetry become a literary model for women.4 While Egan did not cite Wixted's study, perhaps because it was responding broadly to trends in Western feminist theory in the 1980s and 1990s rather than to any such claims made in the field of Chinese literary studies, he notes that Owen's article ruptured the image of the ideal couple that has been an integral part of the Li Qingzhao legend as it points to tensions in the couple's marital relationship and that it generated debates among Chinese scholars. Now Ronald Egan has given us the first comprehensive study of Li Qingzhao in the West. In doing so, he challenges a century of Chinese scholarship to break new ground in our understanding of Li Qingzhao's life and literary achievements. With the assumption of basic knowledge of Li Qingzhao on the part of the reader, the book in eleven chapters analyzes in-depth a broad range of questions surrounding Li Qingzhao's life and writings and the scholarship that has developed around her: social and cultural issues such as the reality women faced as writers in the Song and the exceptional case of Li Qingzhao (Chapters 1 and 2), interpretive questions such as the authenticity of ci attributed to Li and the problem of endemic autobiographical reading (Chapter 3), biographical inquiry into how traumatic events affected the course of Li's life and writing (Chapter 4), and analysis of her extant writings in genres other than the song lyric (Chapters 5 and 6). Three chapters (7, 8, and 9) provide an engaging narrative of the reception history of Li Qingzhao from the Southern Song to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and the twentieth century. This section is important and absorbing for those interested [End Page 403] in how changing images of Li Qingzhao were produced and constructed under different ideological regimes with varying emphasis on female talent and virtue in the later...