The study of women's literary culture in late imperial China has come a long way since Dorothy Ko's pathbreaking book, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Although the names of the women writers and related critical issues examined by Daria Berg in her new book Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700 are already known to us, the author still has much to say about them. If we say that Ko and other pioneering scholars have brought many women writers back to life, the creative energy Berg invested in her book has further enlivened these women with more flesh and blood details.

The book is well organized into six chapters. While each focuses on one significant feature of women's literary culture of the long seventeenth century (1580–1700), all the chapters are connected in one way or another. The book opens with the case of Tanyangzi (1558–80) or Master Tanyang, a teenage widow who became a deity. While previous studies concentrate on her deification as a holy woman, Berg highlights her being a writing woman as perceived by her biographers. In chapter 2 she extends the divinity of female literacy found in Tanyangzi to cases of child prodigies such as the teenage poet Ye Xiaoluan (1616–32), who died young and was believed by her parents and others to have become an immortal. For Berg, the deification of talented girls reveals the contemporary view of emerging literary women as “an unusual phenomenon”, a result of “supernatural intervention and divine causes” (p. 20). Chapter 3 features Xue Susu (fl. 1575–1637), a courtesan who actively socialized with the literati and produced arts to their liking. The author examines not only the poetry but also the paintings of the multitalented courtesan, arguing that Xue not only takes up multiple personae in her writings but also negotiated literary, social and gender boundaries with her artistic productivity (p. 118). Chapter 4 examines Miss Emotion, Xiaoqing (1595–1612), an ex-courtesan and concubine who was talented but suffered mistreatment from her husband and his principal wife. In examining the famous lore, the author brings forth the image of the reader embraced by Xiaoqing, showing the emergent female readership as an important aspect of the transformed literary world. Having explored four individual representative images of late Ming literary women: the writing goddess, the child prodigy, the talented courtesan, and the ex-courtesan and suffering concubine, in the two final chapters the author goes on to discuss the communal activities of literary women: women editing their own writings (chapter 5), and women forming their own literary society (chapter 6). In depicting women's literary communities, these chapters show that writing women indeed gained their momentum in the late Ming and early Qing periods.

In sum, this book is “a new synthesis” of perceptions of literary women drawn from various source materials as well as previous scholarship (p. 251). The author has selected the most illuminating examples, and organized them in her own critical scheme. Although most of the cases and materials have been studied by other scholars, Berg, in her study, explores them in greater depth. She uses an extended notion of the gaze as her analytical tool, examining various gazes in perceiving the rise of literary women in the century, including “the male/female gaze, the poetic, artistic, editorial or public gaze, the scholar's gaze, gentlewoman's gaze, courtesan's gaze, biographer's gaze, tourist gaze and traveler's gaze” (p. 5). The extended gaze is brilliant in enabling the author to gather all the perspectives involved and present a kaleidoscopic view of the literary world around the women. However, it is not sufficiently solid and sustainable as a conceptualizing and framing device for the whole study, resulting in a somewhat superficial and fragmentary presentation of the literary world. What was the real dynamic that shaped the relationship of the women to the literary world? What underscored and sustained the gazes? In which ways did the different gazes interact? The author should have derived a framework and critical concepts from the study of larger historical and cultural trends of the long seventeenth century to explore the above questions. Gentility, of which the author often makes use to explain what motivated the writing women to literary engagements, could be more useful in this regard, if she offered a clearer definition of this concept in relation to literati culture and female gender. Furthermore, the author is right to point out that the literary world of the century encompasses a medley of “scholars, officials, and literati” as well as “those on the fringe of the elite: upstarts, would-be scholars, failed examination candidates, unemployed literati, and women” (p. 6). However, she does not go further to identify the major intellectual force at work in mobilizing literary trends. In discussing specific critical issues, such as professional editorship, she always carefully places them in their longer tradition and larger context. If she could frame her study by relating the rise of writing women to the larger intellectual trends they were involved in and responding to, her book would make an even greater contribution to our understanding of the vibrant literary world of the long seventeenth century of which women were a significant part.