From the 18th century onwards, female authors gained unprecedented prominence, from Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters in the West to the rise of significant women writers in Qing-era China (1644–1912). The increasing prominence of female Chinese authors was driven by Dream of the Red Chamber, an 18th-century masterpiece by Cao Xueqin, widely considered the pinnacle of Chinese fiction and one of the four great classical novels of Chinese history. Cao’s book was so important that a cottage...