The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (review)

In The Talented Women of the Zhang Family, Susan Mann traces the lives of three women from successive generations of a Jiangsu literati family in the mid- to late Qing dynasty: Tang Yaoqing 湯瑤卿 (1763-1831), her daughter, Zhang Qieying (1792-after 1863), and Tang's granddaughter and Zhang's niece, Wang Caipin 王采蘋 (1826-1893). As a poet, Zhang Qieying, along with her sisters Guanying , Lunying 綸英, and Wanying 紈英, achieved a national reputation; Tang Yaoqing and Wang Caipin were remembered only in smaller circles of acquaintances and kin. Mann weaves together the documents of both the most prominent and the somewhat obscure members of this lineage to create a complex family portrait. Taking up where her previous book, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century, left off, this work explores what happened in the nineteenth century to the daughters and granddaughters of the genteel ladies (guixiu 閨秀) of the high Qing.¹ Each chapter title reflects the primary role of its subject: guixiu, poetess, and governess. Although all three women were guixiu and wrote poetry, it is the distinctions between their primary roles that are key to Mann's narrative about changes in personal fate, family fortunes, and historical context.

The book also experiments with various genres of historiography. In each chapter Mann first relates each woman's life story from the subject's point of view, imagining scenes, conversations, and unspoken thoughts and emotions. She then caps each narrative with comments and analysis in her own voice. In making a distinction between a fully imagined narrative and the judgments of the historian, Mann has been inspired by none other than Sima Qian's Shiji. By choosing to write in this way, she exposes herself to the same criticism directed at her predecessor: is the imaginative re-creation of scenes the proper role of a historian? In her prologue she notes her initial hesitation, admitting how she had feared that imagining scenes not documented by the textual record would lead her away from her sources. But she asserts that, on the contrary, this imaginative process provided insights that she otherwise would have missed (p. xvi).

Throughout her narrative and commentary Mann deals masterfully with both the plentitude of, and the omissions from, the records for this family. She honors the manner by which the Zhangs wished to be remembered, but she also "asks some questions they would not have thought to ask, much less answer" (p. xv). Using her irreproachable knowledge of social, cultural, and intellectual history to fill in depth and shadow, Mann translates first-person lyric voices and third-person accounts into first-person prose voices. Then, in the historian's voice, she simultaneously reveals what the Zhang women's lives show about the world in which they lived and what a historian's knowledge of that world reveals to us about their lives.

As the title indicates, the book is a portrait of an entire family, not simply of three individuals. The extended family was the primary (though not the only) context in which these women crafted and shared their self-images. Alongside the three women whom Mann has chosen as protagonists, many other kinsmen and kinswomen emerge as important characters. Indeed, Mann's study of the Zhangs, which reveals flexibility and regional variation, forces readers to reconsider the definition of family in late imperial China. Of the talented women of the Zhang family described in the title, only one was actually surnamed Zhang. Much of Tang Yaoqing's childhood was spent in the household of her maternal aunt. Their native place, Changzhou, had a strong custom of uxorilocal marriages, and even Zhang Qieying, whose marriage technically was not uxorilocal, did not leave her natal family for her husband's home until she turned forty. Wang Caipin grew up as the daughter of an uxorilocal marriage, in a joint household consisting of a brother, two sisters, and their spouses and children. Consequently, Mann's narration and...