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PARA/TEXTS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF LIFE HISTORIES IN
WOMEN’S LITERARY COLLECTIONS IN QING CHINA (1644‐1911):
THE CASE OF CHEN YUNLIAN (CA. 1810 ‐ CA. 1860)
Grace S. FONG *
In the textual culture of late imperial China (16th‐19th centuries), we can observe a marked
increase in “paratexts,” the textual and other materials that frame or present an author’s texts in a
printed collection. 1 With the recent rediscovery of women’s writings from this period, we are in a
position to investigate this pronounced development in literary collections from a gendered
perspective. The strong autobiographical dimensions of women’s poetry collections were often
packaged by multiple paratexts, such as prefaces, endorsement poems, biographies, epitaphs,
marginal and interlineal notes, commentaries, and postscripts. Such paratextual framing devices
constitute discursive sites of influence on the public’s reception of the author’s life and work that
often stand in dialogic relation to the author’s own textual self‐representations. I will examine one
woman writer’s negotiation of these frames in telling her life story.
Chen Yunlian’s multi‐layered auto/biographical collection: Editions and paratexts
The work examined is Xinfangge shicao, or Poems from the Loft of Trusting Fragrance (hereafter
Poems from the Loft), published in 1859, by the woman poet and painter Chen Yunlian (cognomen
Muqing). 2 Chen was a native of Jiangyin in present‐day Jiangsu province, but she followed her
husband to the port city of Tianjin near Beijing and lived most of her life there. Poems from the Loft is
a substantial collection containing 599 poems in five chapters framed by seven paratexts. I will
explore the complex, layered, complementary as well as conflictual para/textual strands in the
construction of one component of Chen Yunlian’s life history.
The collection is arranged in implicit chronological order. That is to say, Poems from the Loft does
not use explicit time markers, such as chapter titles indicating life stages, nor group poetic
compositions under a specific year or period as found in some collections. But the dated poems show
a rough temporal order. What distinguishes Poems from the Loft are the multiple layers of the
collection, the arrangement of the paratexts, and the exceptional authorial paratexts penned by
Chen Yunlian herself, which make this an illuminating example of the discursive power of para/texts
in producing life histories and the woman author’s role in this production.
In the voice of others: Allographic paratexts (P1‐P4):
(P1) The collection opens with a preface dated 1841written by Fang Tinghu, who was an
acquaintance or colleague of Chen Yunlian’s husband, Zuo Chen. He praised Chen’s superb talents in
the three literati arts: poetry, painting, and calligraphy. Fang refers to what might have been a handcopied
manuscript of Chen Yunlian’s poetry, on which he wrote what would have been a postscript. 3
In the 1859 edition, this original “postscript” was transformed into a preface by its relocation to the
very beginning of the collection. Its presence has the effect of calling attention to Chen’s early
accomplishments as a published poet, for she would have been around thirty in 1841.
(P2) The second preface was also written earlier, in 1847, by Pan Suxin, a senior woman friend, a
Hangzhou native but long‐time resident in Beijing. Pan was well‐known in the capital among
*
Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, Canada.