Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

Abstract

[...]of the death of the oldest son Juesun in adolescence, the youngest child and only surviving male, Yuesun, became the Zhang heir, and this man who had been raised with four older sis- ters eventually became the formal head of household responsible for three of them, along with their husbands and children. Mann's problems with her material are the familiar ones for scholars exploring gender history in premodern China-dependence upon sources authored by males, usually kinsmen. [...]the poetical record left by women themselves, which has been opened up recently by scholars such as Kang-i Sun Chang, and in the case of the Zhang oeuvre has been lovingly translated here by Mann, turns out to expose a relatively narrow, if deep, range of emotions and experience.