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313 Ronald Egan in This Definitive Work on the Song Dynasty Poet Li Men, Women and Gender in China book reviews Nan Nü 17 (2015) 313-316 313 Ronald Egan The Burden of Female Talent : The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. ix+ 422 pp. $59.95. ISBN 9780674726697. In this definitive work on the Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084-ca. 1155), the most famous woman writer in traditional Chinese literature, Ronald Egan gives us no fewer than four productive approaches to Li’s work, life, and reputation : an assessment of the impact of her gender identity on her writing; new evidence that clarifies contested elements of her biography; a critical as- sessment of the authenticity of elements of her song lyric (ci 詞) corpus; and finally, a reception history of her work that stretches from the Southern Song (1127–1279) to the twenty-first century. Scholars from all periods of Chinese lit- erature will find much to learn here – not just about Li Qingzhao as a poet and a historical subject but also about how to handle limited evidence and vast bodies of secondary scholarship with precision and care, and how to histori- cize one’s object of study in ways that will foster, rather than silence, debate over her significance. Egan’s readings of several key Li Qingzhao texts, includ- ing the essay Ci lun 詞論 (On song lyrics) and the houxu 後序 (Afterword) to her husband Zhao Mingcheng’s 趙明誠 (1081–1129) collection, the Jin shi lu 金石錄 (Records on metal and stone), as well as lesser-studied lyrics from her ci corpus, are new and thought-provoking. Egan’s deep familiarity with Li’s cor- pus and its evolution and with the key points of contention over the centuries makes his discussion of Li Qingzhao’s complex reception history nuanced and specific. And his examination of the authenticity and transmission of Li’s song lyric corpus, including the hermeneutic and publishing practices that expand- ed her corpus long after her death, will stand as a model for future studies of poetic transmission. The fact that Egan’s study effectively settles so many ques- tions of biography, authenticity, and reception opens up a new possibility in the study of Li Qingzhao: that her work can in some ways cast off the “burden of female talent” and be more fully integrated into the landscape of Chinese literature. The breadth of Egan’s study does not make it an easy read, and in the eleven chapters (plus introduction and conclusion) there is some occasional doubling back to material covered in earlier chapters. Historians may find the chapters on biography and the historical contexts of her changing reception – Chapters 2, 4, and 7–9 – of greater interest, whereas literature scholars may be drawn more to the chapters that discuss women as writers in the Song period (Chap- ter 1), and those that examine her song lyric corpus in the light of authenticity and new readings (Chapters 3, 10, and 11). But a set of arguments binds the ISSN 1387-6805 (print version) ISSN 1568-5268 (online version) NANU 2 ©Nan koninklijke Nü 17 (2015) brill 313-316 nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/15685268-00172p06 314 book reviews chapters together: first, that Li Qingzhao felt keenly the difficulties of writing as an elite woman in Song China, and that her work reveals both the obstacles to her writings and her efforts to fight them; second, that men and women readers in the centuries after the Song brought their own judgments about women’s moral conduct to the reading of the “Li Qingzhao” they sought, and their convictions about the place of women and women writers in their own historical moment shaped their reading of even the smallest details of Li’s biography and texts. Finally – perhaps most provocatively – Egan approaches Li’s works with a constant awareness of her identity as a woman writer in a specific historical context, a historicist viewpoint that foregrounds Li’s gender in every chapter. One of the strongest contributions of Egan’s book is the attention to the so- cial, cultural, and economic challenges Li Qingzhao faced as she negotiated new social roles – as a young wife, as a refugee from the Northern Song collapse in 1127, as an unprotected widow, as an unhappily re-married woman, and fi- nally as a divorced and respectable older woman. Drawing on recent scholar- ship on women in Song history and the close reading of sometimes scanty biographical evidence, Egan makes the case that each of these roles created new demands of and constraints on Li’s self-expression. In Chapters 1 and 2, Egan demonstrates her consistent interest in writing beyond the conventional voices and topics relegated to women. One of the strengths of Egan’s study is his attention to texts that demonstrate Li’s intellectual complexity and ambi- tion, such as the literary critical essay Ci lun (Chapter 2), shi 詩 poems on po- litical topics such as the dispatch of Southern Song emissaries to treat with the Jin 金 (Chapters 2 and 5), and discussions of a gambling game that are tinged with political allegory (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2, Egan introduces the key de- bates that would shape her reception over time by discussing the Song critical reactions to her work which inevitably resorted to biographical details (or myths) to denigrate her, such as Wang Zhuo’s 王灼 (d. 1160) false claim that Li “drifted about haplessly and had no home to return to” (liu dang wu gui 流蕩 無歸) until her death (pp. 59–60). This discussion of the negative reaction of Song male readers serves as the backdrop for Egan’s reading of the essay Ci lun which he frames as “a statement about the song lyric springing fundamentally from her own sense of the chal- lenge she faced as a woman writer who wished to accomplish something in that literary form” (p. 76). In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, Egan brings the available evi- dence for Li’s late life to bear on key texts of those years, including the famous “Afterword” to her husband’s collection of colophons. In Chapter 6, he offers a new perspective on the “Afterword” that recasts the text as Li’s multilayered personal defense, one intended to shore up her social position among her Nan Nü 17 (2015) 313-316.
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