Description
Book SynopsisThe last century of Ming rule (1368-1644) in China saw an unparalleled and short-lived loosening of the restraints of conventional Confucian morality in both art and literature, and the two novellas translated in
Of Woman by Woman are representative of that trend. Both were written under pseudonyms, and although there is evidence that both appeared first in the mid to late sixteenth-century, neither their authorship nor publication date can be established with any precision. Both were proscribed in the eighteenth-century literary inquisition of the Qianlong emperor, and remained banned in China until copies first appeared on the Internet in the 1990s. They are still largely unknown there, and hence have received scant attention from scholars both in East and West. Both, however, are milestones in China's literary history.
The first,
Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan), recounts the amours of China's one and only female emperor, Wu Zetian, who exercised power
