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Book Review

Asia

Susan Mann. Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 326. Cloth $49.50, paper $17.95.

Susan Mann's study has already been universally praised both as a provocative addition to the historical understanding of late imperial China and as an important contribution to the wider field of gender studies. Focusing on women and their writings in the period from the final consolidation of the Qing dynasty in 1683 to the outbreak of the Opium Wars in 1839, she aims to elucidate the actual thoughts and feelings of the women of the time, and to qualify the "distortions of the male gaze" that have hitherto informed the prevailing discourse on the history of the high Qing era. 1

We are reminded, to begin with, that more than 1,500 of the almost 3,000 extant Qing literary works by women date from this period. Most of these were produced in the lower Yangtze region, and perhaps seventy percent of them consist of poetry. Although these often brilliant works are somewhat conventional in theme, and are the products of women of the leisured class, Mann uses them skillfully both to site a wider spectrum of women at the center of eighteenth-century history in China and to raise new historiographical questions. . . .

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