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Ronald Egan : The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China . (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series.) ix, 422 pp. Cambridge, MA and London : Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press , 2013. £42.95. ISBN 978 0 674 72669 7 .
Reviews: East Asia
It is not easy to dislodge images of great poets of China's past that appear to be sculpted in stone, as is literally the case in so many of that nation's museums and tourist sites today. And yet this is precisely what Ronald C. Egan has managed brilliantly to do in his magisterial new book, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China. This is a substantial volume - over 400 pages - for a poet whose extant corpus of reliably identifiable lyrics amounts to no more than forty. But Li Qingzhao was no ordinary poet, given that for centuries (and even today) she has occupied the rather lonely position of being the one and only Chinese woman poet that everyone knows about, and whose place among the greats is largely uncontested. Egan's achievement is to show, through a combination of careful historical research and close literary analysis, that Li Qingzhao was indeed extraordinary, but not for the superficial, biased or outright erroneous reasons that are often given. His approach is both meticulous and exhaustive, but thanks to his characteristically lucid writing style, the resulting study is...