ABSTRACT
Women in seventeenth-century China publicly set out to fashion the female self — by editing and publishing their own and other women's writings. Seventeenth-century China witnessed the first wave of famous women editors, including both courtesans and gentlewomen. About a dozen names of seventeenth-century women editors have been transmitted: the courtesans Xue Susu (fl. 1575–1637) and Wang Wei (c. 1600–17) who blazed the trail in female editorship as agency during the first decades of the seventeenth century; 1 and the gentlewomen Shen Yixiu (1590–1635), Wang Duanshu (1621-c1701), Fang Weiyi (1585–1668) and Ji Xian (1614–83) active in the mid-seventeenth century, followed by later seventeenth-century editors who worked and published in teams such as the groups around Huang Dezhen and her daughter Sun Huiyuan. Ex-courtesans who had married into the elite as concubines such as Dong Xiaowan (1624–51) and Liu Rushi (1618–64) 2 are also known to have been involved in, or assisted their husbands with, some editorial activities.
