Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

As usual, Lisa See has crafted an engaging historical fiction novel centering on women and their relationships in Lady Tan’s Circle of Women (2023).

In the late 1400s, in China during the Ming dynasty, child Tan Yunxian witnesses her mother’s death because of infection in her bound feet and the lack of medical care for women (because women could not be in the presence of men outside their family nor could they be touched by the primarily all male doctors). She and her father’s concubine and her little brother are sent to live with his parents while her father pursues his career.

This is actually a positive development, though it upends her world, because she is doted on by her grandparents, and her grandmother is rare–she has inherited the knowledge of Chinese medicine from her own family, and wants to pass it along to Tan Yunxian. Her grandmother also encourages a friendship with Meiling, the daughter of the local midwife, who does not have bound feet and is destined to become a midwife like her mother. Midwives deal with the realities of birth and death–and are deemed somewhat unclean because they deal with blood and other bodily fluids, while doctors merely take the patient’s pulse and ask questions about other symptoms.

Eventually Tan Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage that is not intolerable, except for her mother-in-law, who does not want her to practice medicine or maintain her friendship with Meiling. Lady Tan does the best that she can, but bears three daughters in a row, no sons, which is a disappointment because bearing a son is her primary duty. Eventually, her grandmother works out an arrangement with her mother-in-law so that she is able to continue her medical studies.

Through Lady Tan’s long life, we follow her, Meiling, and the other women in the household. It’s based on a true story of a woman doctor, and I was completely immersed in it. There is a bit of a murder mystery embedded within, contact with the Emperor’s household, and travel, which was unusual for Chinese women in that era.

There were some descriptions of characters with “extra” around their middle, as Lady Tan states “typically happens for women during their “sitting quietly” time of life,” after childbearing is over, but the descriptions were neutral and did not appear to be for the purpose of negative characterization. I consider it weight-neutral.