Reverie and Reality

This is a study of Chinese gentry women’s poems on the theme of travel written during the late imperial period (ca.1600–1911), when Chinese women’s literature and culture flourished as never before. It challenges the clichéd image of completely secluded and immobile women anxiously waiting inside their prescribed feminine space, the so-called inner quarters, for the return of traveling husbands or other male kin. The travel poems discussed in this book, while not necessarily representative of all of the women writers of this period, point to the fact that many of them longed to explore the world through travel as did so many of their male counterparts. Sometimes they were able to actualize this desire for travel and sometimes they were forced to resort to imaginary “armchair travel.” In either case, women writers often used poetry as a means of recording their experiences or delineating their dreams of traveling outside the inner quarters, and indeed sometimes far away from the inner quarters. With its promise of adventure and fulfillment and, above all, a broadening of one’s intellectual and emotional horizons, travel was an important, and until now understudied, theme of late imperial women’s poetry.

I very much enjoyed this book. It explores a hitherto neglected dimension of women’s lives and of late imperial travel culture more generally, based on a judicious selection of primary sources, the majority of which were new to me. Wang’s translations are consistently excellent; in their balance of accuracy and readability they represent some of the most successful examples of translation of classical Chinese poetry I have seen. . . .[T]his book is an original and very readable study of a fascinating dimension of late imperial China’s cultural and social history. Wang’s first-rate translations are a particular highlight of the volume, which represents a welcome contribution to our understanding of gender in late-Ming and Qing society. I look forward to reading more by the same author., Reverie and Reality is a marvelous examination of Chinese women’s poetry about travel, a neglected topic that Wang masterfully analyzes. Readers will enjoy the richness of the poetry translations and profit from the author’s deep insights into the literary qualities of these poems. This highly readable scholarly study is an important contribution to understanding Chinese women’s writing of the late imperial era., Chinese women poets of the last few centuries of imperial China often complained that their social position (and their bound feet) limited their freedom to travel and broaden their experiences, reducing their poetry to rhymes on breeze and moon. Yanning Wang’s wide-ranging monograph demonstrates that many women poets actually did have extensive travel experiences, some of them by visiting the scenic spots and temples around their hometowns, others by trekking through the length and breadth of China as they accompanied their male relatives to their official postings or escorted their bones back home for burial—in the last years of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) a few even started to travel beyond the Middle Kingdom. Many of the women poets who had no opportunity to travel widely indulged in “armchair travel” through China or visionary journeys through the realms of the immortals. This book is an important contribution to the scholarship on traditional Chinese women’s poetry as it shows how women made use of the various chances offered to them and reflected on the landscapes and societies they encountered.

Yanning Wang is assistant professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University.