The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China. By Ronald Egan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. ix, 422 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

Ronald Egan's book on the greatest Chinese woman poet Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084–ca. 1155) is simply brilliant. It contributes to our knowledge of the subject in several significant ways. In recent years, Li Qingzhao has again emerged as the focus of scholarly attention in China, as may be seen in major publications by such authors as Chen Zumei 陈祖美 (in 2001), Zhuge Yibing 诸葛忆兵 (in 2004), and Deng Hongmei 邓红梅 (in 2005). But none of these books have taken the same approach as Egan's, and I believe that Egan is the first scholar in any language to have studied Li Qingzhao in such a thorough and meticulous way. The book manages to be specific and broad-ranging at the same time.First of all, the book gives innovative rereadings of Li Qingzhao that will change the conventional reading of the woman poet. Egan shows how this unique woman poet was committed to recording her experiences in writing, at a time when Chinese gentry women were taught to read but not to write. Most importantly, Egan has perceptively read Li Qingzhao's “Afterword to Records on Metal and Stone,” a piece Li wrote for her husband's posthumous collection of rubbings, as a way “to reestablish herself” and “to reassert her voice as a writer” following her short remarriage and divorce (p. 191). The fact that the years after her divorce turned out to be the most productive of Li's entire life (as a writer) is also an important revelation that Egan has brought to the field. This new reading has definitely changed our perception of Li Qingzhao. Chinese critics used to think that Li Qingzhao spent her final years wandering as a homeless person, but Egan's research tells us that in her old age Li was socially active and had frequent contact with eminent persons and even the imperial court.Egan uses wide-ranging sources to demonstrate how the image of Li Qingzhao was constructed and reconstructed during the last several centuries in China. He argues that the conventional way of equating Li Qingzhao's literary voice (especially in ci) with the historical poet's life is problematic. He points out that the most troublesome of such “biographical reading” is the “circularity” of the critics' own reasoning. Worse, there was a serious loss of Li's collected works in later times, which makes interpretation problematic. However, thanks to Egan, we finally have a book that provides impeccable scholarship on the various premodern anthologies of ci poetry that anthologized song lyrics written by (or attributed to) Li Qingzhao. In dealing with the authorship issue, Egan always provides sufficient evidence for what is being discussed—including the pros and cons. For example, in the context of discussing some “playful and flirtatious” song lyrics attributed to Li Qingzhao, Egan comments on how the attribution might have reflected late Ming taste: “It was precisely because a new feminine image and ideal was evolving in Ming-Qing times, in which a woman was admired not simply for beauty but also for talent … that Li Qingzhao proved to be such a beacon from the past” (p. 360). Moreover, actual husband-wife exchanges during the Ming, such as those between Huang E 黄峨 and her husband Yang Shen 杨慎, may have encouraged anthologists to attribute similar poems to Li Qingzhao, poems that Li “could be imagined to have written for her husband, Zhao Mingcheng” (p. 362).5 On the other hand, as Egan says, “it does not seem implausible” that Li might have written these poems herself, if we think of her as “someone intensely interested in the song lyric,” “well versed in its range” and “its variety of styles” (p. 364).Throughout the book, Egan argues that the concept of gender construction is fundamental to a rereading of Li Qingzhao. Egan is mainly concerned about Li's unique position as a woman poet who ventured into a male literary world. In particular, he argues that Li's famous essay, “On Song Lyrics,” not only expresses the woman poet's struggle to overcome the gender biases her aspirations must have constantly encountered, but also “to win some critical acceptance for her work in the eyes of the arbiters of literary taste and achievement” (p. 75). Such a reading is very different from the conventional reading of Li's essay on ci.Every scholar of Chinese literature should read this book. It is a book that informs its reader of the amazing power of intertextuality and rereading.