Luke’s Reviews > The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China > Status Update

16. The Beheaded Feminist: Qiu Jin

16 "defective" plot elements: 1) men dressing up as women; 2) secret vows of marriage; 3) premarital sex; 4) elopements of adulterous women; 5) widows losing their chastity; 6) robbery and murder; 7) imprisonment; 8) murder for political motives; 9) secret conspiracy with foreign countries; 10) obsequious flattery of the powerful; 11) instruction in the methods of the immortals...

It's true enough that poems and books cannot stave off hunger,
But if I threw away my poems and books, I wouldn't have a life.

Wang Duanshu (1621-1685), 'When My Woman Friend Dong Dasurou Came for a Visit, There Was No Cooked Food'

The landscape of Euro/Neo-Euro lit would be more interesting if parents had thought to publish the works of their deceased daughters.

This chapter devoted entirely to Li Qingzhao, one of only two chapters out of sixteen which concerns a woman writer rather than a group, just smacked me upside the head for not knowing who she is.

One can accept the female authorship of these materials only if one is prepared to accept the existence of female immortals.

Pretending to take Milton prof's Eurocentrism seriously while reading this is hard. Like, broke-a-rib-trying-to-keep-a-straight-face hard.

The last 152 pages may be pure reference materials, but we're talking a seven by ten by two-and-a-half inch tome with an eighth of an inch font size. The font gets even smaller when it comes to the excerpts, and of those there are legion.