This is a study of Chinese gentry women's poems on the theme of travel written during the late imperial period (ca.1600-1911), when Chinese women's literature and culture flourished as never before. It challenges the cliched image of completely secluded and immobile women anxiously waiting inside their prescribed feminine space, the so-called inner quarters, for the return of traveling husbands or other male kin. The travel poems discussed in this book, while not necessarily representative of all of the women writers of this period, point to the fact that many of them longed to explore the...