title: The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
author:  Ellen Widmer 
description: Ellen Widmer is Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of East Asian Studies at Wellesley College.
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00204.jpeg)
  
  Advance praise  
  for The Green Phoenix
  
  “So much of imperial Chinese history is an enigma; a world we, as outsiders,
  are shut out off. Alice Poon’s novelised life of the Empress Dowager
  Xiaozhuang fictionally pulls back the curtain on Manchu court life and lets us
  step into a forbidden world.”
  
  — _Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking_
  
  “Alice Poon has written a masterpiece of Chinese history little known in the
  West. It’s a story of love, betrayal and loyalty, and shows how one woman
  inspired the reunification of China. For so long the West has fixated on the
  end of the Qing dynasty, but as Poon beautifully recreates in her book, the
  real heroine of the Qing is the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang. Never before has
  this story been told in English, and it’s arguably the most important
  historical novel of early Qing Dynasty China.”
  
  — _Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China
  Gone Wrong_
  
  “The Green Phoenix illuminates the co