The Burden of Female Talent

“The number of song lyrics that may be reliably identified as Li’s is halved to 36 and none is conclusively dated, while previous interpretations tied to assumptions about her life are disproved. Egan analyzes this small corpus in a tour de force entirely free of biography. But what is most valuable is that he replaces the myths with convincing portraits of Li’s thinking and actions that draw on her prose as well as poetry, developing them with sense, sensitivity and erudition…The insights of this study will elicit as much respect for her grit and her suppressed, defiant, unrealized ambitions as for her poetry. The first work of this kind in any language, The Burden of Female Talent is both grand synthesis and original scholarship, with a clear style that makes a complex story easy to follow.”—Eva Shan Chou, Times Higher Education