Exemplary Women of Early China: The 'Lienii zhuan' of Liu Xiang.

• Author: Wang, Robin R.
• Position: Book review

Exemplary Women of Early China: The "Lienii zhuan" of Liu Xiang. Translated and edited by ANNE BEHNKE KINNEY. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. lvi + 323. $105 (cloth); $35 (paper).

The Lienii zhuan (Categorized biographies of exemplary women) by the prominent Han scholar Liu Xiang (79-78 B.C.E.) is the earliest extant book solely devoted to female moral education. Its 125 biographies of women are intended to evoke and commemorate an ideal of womanhood. Since Liu Xiang's innovative endeavor, the stories of exemplary women (lienu) he brought together have permeated all aspects of women's lives throughout Chinese history. From such stories was gradually fashioned a celebrated and enduring lienii tradition. However, Liu's original text remained a hidden resource for long and was never adequately studied in the English-speaking world. Now Anne Behnke Kinney's faithful and eloquent translation presents a ground-breaking effort that will allow readers to rediscover a foundational book of early Chinese women's life, moral code, and inspiration.

The book consists of an introduction and an annotated translation in eight chapters, based on Liu Xiang's original structure. Liu Xiang first characterizes six desirable virtues grouped in six chapters, namely, maternal models (muyi), the worthy and enlightened (xianming), the sympathetic and wise (renzhi), the chaste and compliant (zhenshun), the principled and righteous (jieyi), and accomplished rhetoricians (biantong). Each chapter or category includes biographies of fifteen commendable women. Chapter seven, called "The Depraved and Favored" (niebi), identifies fifteen reprehensible women. The last chapter collects twenty supplementary biographies. The lively and stimulating stories of the Lienu zhuan illustrate how Liu Xiang constructed a normative standard for women (what ought to be the case) through the description of real lives (what is the case), that is a strong convergence of the Confucian ideal of becoming human and Liu Xiang's notion of a model woman.

Through the performance of a "critical intimacy" with the original text and its history, Kinney is able to articulate a brilliant, fresh, and scholarly contextualized introduction. It promotes a better understanding of this ancient text, in particular, and, more generally, opens up new horizons for Chinese gender studies. Her introduction unfolds a historical and conceptual narrative to show the specific impetus for Liu Xiang's...