Introduction / Grace S. Fong
Writing and illness: a feminine condition in women's poetry of the Ming and Qing / Grace S. Fong
Lamenting the dead: women's performance of grief in late imperial China / Anne E. McLaren
Retrieving the past: women editors and women's poetry, 1636-1941 / Ellen Widmer
The unseen hand: contextualizing Luo Qilan and her anthologies / Robyn Hamilton
From private life to public performances: the constituted memory and (re)writings of the early-Qing woman Wu Zongai / Wei Hua
Women writers and gender boundaries during the Ming-Qing transition / Wai-yee Li
Chan friends: poetic exchanges between gentry women and Buddhist nuns in seventeenth-century China / Beata Grant
War, violence, and the metaphor of blood in Tanci narratives by women authors / Siao-chen Hu
The lady and the state: women's writings in times of trouble during the nineteenth century / Susan Mann
Imagining history and the state: Fujian guixiu (genteel ladies) at home and on the road / Guotong Li
Xue Shaohui and her poetic chronicle of late Qing reforms / Nanxiu Qian
Conclusion: Literary authorship by late imperial governing-class Chinese women and the emergence of a "minor literature".