Chapter Emotion and Female Authority: A Comparison of Chinese and English Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This essay considers how early modern Chinese romance novels conceive of female agency and how this conception was received by prominent cultural elites in eighteenth-century England. In his notes to Hau Kiou Choaan, the first English translation of a full-length Chinese novel, Thomas Percy referred to the novel’s heroine as a “masculine woman”, displaying a peculiar misreading of its trope of female cross-dressing. The essay argues that the increasing association of women with the private sphere in eighteenth-century English culture is a crucial context to consider when we study the initial spread of Chinese fiction in England.