The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

Jeffrey Wasserstrom It’s set in the Qing dynasty, mostly in the 19th century, and it tries to bring to life the experiences of the women of a single family. One of the challenges of biographies of women in different settings is the limited records that are left of their lives. But with these particular women, they wrote a lot of poetry, and Mann uses that to great effect. She also experiments with the form of writing. She’s doing something that in Chinese would be called waishi, which means ‘unconventional history’. As Mann describes it, it records things that might have happened, based on invented or... (Source)