The autobiographical accounts of Shen Fu (1763–?) have fascinated readers since their discovery in a secondhand bookshop in Suzhou in 1874. Six Records of a Life Adrift (Fu sheng liu ji) enjoyed great popularity among readers when it was finally published in 1877, and subsequent editions have made the book an essential part of the canon of late imperial Chinese literature.

The Records bring together stories, episodes and anecdotes from Shen's life in Suzhou and his travels as a chronically underemployed private secretary to government officials. Although some parts of the story appear only as fragments – a note on orchids here, an account of a tour on a scenic mountain there – these glimpses of daily life, along with longer scenes and accounts of conversations, yield a uniquely intimate portrait of Shen's experiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Records are best known for their account of Shen's loving marriage to Chen Yun, whom Lin Yutang (1895–1976) called “one of the loveliest women in Chinese literature”, and for Yun's tragic death.

Only four of Shen Fu's six records survived, although forgers and creative admirers have offered newly “discovered” versions of the two missing chapters. (These spurious texts are not included in the present translation.) The first record, “Delights of marriage,” collects scenes from Shen Fu's marriage to Yun, showing their joyous relationship as perfectly matched husband and wife. “Charms of idleness”, the second record, includes many short jottings that attest to the author's extensive knowledge and connoisseurship in flowers, bamboo, incense, and wine – refined tastes he could rarely afford with his unstable income and constant need to borrow money from family or pawn his possessions. The third record, “Sorrows of hardship”, goes into the details of the difficulties Shen Fu, like many other educated men who never passed the civil examinations, found in maintaining steady employment. Shen's descriptions of Yun's death in this chapter are among the most poignant in all of literature written in classical prose. “Pleasures of roaming”, the final extant chapter, offers observations of the sights Shen Fu took in across eastern China as he travelled for his work as a private secretary. The abrupt end to the book leaves us to speculate about further stories of Shen Fu and his family which were held in the other lost chapters.

Graham Sanders's rendition in English of Six Records of a Life Adrift is a joy to read. Sanders has given students, teachers and scholars a new and authoritative translation of Shen Fu's classic that deserves to be adopted in any course on late imperial or modern Chinese literature, history and culture. This translation follows Shen Fu's elegant, meandering sentences and phrasing, giving a sense of the author's individual style and the flavour of prose written in classical Chinese. Sanders also corrects many errors that have appeared in previous translations published by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui, Six Records of a Floating Life (New York, 1983) and Lin Yutang, Six Chapters of a Floating Life, published in The Wisdom of China and India (New York, 1942).

The translator provides a clear and accessible introduction, succinctly placing the work in its historical context. The footnotes patiently explain the wide range of literary allusions and references to historical events found in Shen Fu's Records; their clarity and accuracy are a testament to the translator's erudition and the time that was surely spent ensuring that each note adds to the reader's understanding of the text. Here, too, Hackett Publishing deserves credit for opting to use footnotes instead of endnotes, making the design of the book much friendlier to students and general readers so that they do not have to choose between flipping between main text and endnotes or ignoring the notes entirely. Additionally, modern maps, a table containing Shen Fu's associates and family tree, and list of historical figures mentioned in the book also serve to make the book even more accessible.

The quality of this edition leads this reader to think about how it might be usefully included in courses on twentieth-century China, because the history of the discovery, reprinting, and reception of the Six Records makes the book a very modern text. Discovered decades after the author's death, the appeal of the book to a man like Wang Tao (1828–97), who, in his own time, was considered a major authority on “Western learning”, points to a circuit of nostalgia and mourning among intellectuals of the late Qing and Republican era that deserves to be studied in its own right. The deep sentiments stirred by Shen Fu's lament for his lost wife and his accounts of the dim prospects he faced as a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century must have resonated deeply with many readers from the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century who saw that world slipping away or lived to see it disappear forever.