Lady Tan's Circle of Women
Lady Tan's Circle of Women
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Lisa See on Lady Tan's Circle of Women
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A gray spine, a locked-down house, and a paragraph on page 19Seven months into COVID lockdown, in October 2020, See had not been looking for a new subject. She was walking past a wall of research books in her home office when one volume she had owned for a decade without opening seemed to demand her attention.
I don’t know why. Gray jacket with slightly darker gray lettering, but it’s like it flew off the shelf and into my hands.
That book was ‘Reproducing Women: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Ming Dynasty,’ and on page 19 a single paragraph named Tan Yunxian, a Ming-dynasty physician who, at fifty, had published a collection of her own medical cases.
See ordered Tan’s ‘Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor,’ still in print in English, and committed to a novel within a day. The speed was completely out of character. For comparison, she had spent twenty years thinking about ‘The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane’ before finding her way into it.
Within twenty-six hours, I knew that I was going to be writing about her. That was so completely different than any other book that I’ve written. Usually, I think about something for five, ten, fifteen, even twenty years.
Part of what accelerated the decision was the sheer improbability of Tan’s text still existing. See placed that survival in the company of every other pre-1511 book a reader might name.
Just think about how many books are still in print from before 1511? Just a handful — the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Greek tragedies and comedies, Beowulf is in there. All of them written by men. [paraphrased from audio]
When See read Tan’s actual case records, she found two patients who shattered the Confucian expectation that an elite woman never ventures more than three steps beyond her front gate: one held the tiller on a boat, another made bricks and tiles. The contradiction between those patients and the social rules Tan supposedly lived by was the fiction waiting to be written.
If this was an elite woman who was never supposed to go beyond her front gate, how did she meet the tiller woman? How did she meet that brick and tile maker?
How she wrote it
Rare books, Zoom scholars, and the Jenga principleSee normally travels to the places she writes about and spends months in UCLA’s research libraries, but in 2020 those libraries were closed and China was inaccessible. She redirected the money budgeted for flights and hotels toward buying rare books she couldn’t borrow, and then reached out directly to scholars she had previously only read. A Harvard professor she described as ‘kind of the god of Chinese studies’ in this field spoke with her repeatedly, and she watched a midwifery presentation broadcast from Singapore at two in the morning. Her closest collaborator was Lorraine Wilcox, who had translated Tan’s case records into English and lived twenty minutes away in Culver City. They couldn’t meet in person, but they met on Zoom sometimes twice a week. The ambition driving all of it was consistent.
I want to share what real life was like with my readers. Not just what they wore, but also what they ate, how their hair was styled, what their home looked like on the inside, and how it was heated. I wanted to know how long it took them to travel from one place to another, and how they got there. What was it like inside a palanquin? Was there a postal system and could they mail a letter? I want to know the details, even if it becomes just one sentence in an entire book, because I want readers to know what it’s like to be in the room with my characters.
Accumulating that volume of research created its own structural problem: how much of it ends up on the page. See described her solution using the image of a block-stacking game in which the skill is knowing what to remove without bringing everything down.
I do think of it a little bit like that game Jenga, if you’ve ever played where they put the pieces and then you start pulling them out... I want there to be enough information there that people can be immersed in that world, but not so much that they just stop dead and have to like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a...Here’s the history lesson.’ So it’s...I want that structure to still be there and feel like it’s strong, but it’s not gonna collapse either.
Several of the novel’s most arresting scenes did not require invention. They arrived from the historical record, and See’s craft question became not what to invent but where to place what already happened and how each real event would ripple through the surrounding story.
There are a couple of scenes in the book, you’ll recognize them, the story of the worm, the story of the message that’s written on the baby’s foot, and then also what happens in front of the empress and the consequences of that. All of those are real stories that happened to real women.
One detail required no archival digging at all. The 16th-century marriage bed that appears in the novel has sat in her family’s Chinatown antique store for generations, and See and her cousins played inside it as children.
You walk inside and it’s like you’re in another world, another time. This is a place to imagine and dream, surrounded by beautiful, lacquered wood and intricate carvings. It became a centerpiece in the book, adorned with secret compartments and silk paintings.
The personal thread
What months of isolation taught her about women’s friendshipsThe pandemic shaped not just See’s research methods but the emotional center of the book itself. Writing in isolation over many months, she found herself examining what connection actually costs and provides, in ways that fed directly into the novel’s argument about female friendship.
I just think especially during those long months of isolation, that I personally really thought a lot about friendship and what that has meant to me in my own life and how it gives women such comfort but also fortitude.
That personal reckoning with friendship sat inside a larger motivation that has driven her historical fiction for decades. She describes recovering women’s histories as something close to an obligation, rooted in a specific belief about the relationship between past and present.
I feel very strongly that we’re only able to know and do what we can today because of the generations of women who came before us. And it motivates me to write about women’s history that has been lost or forgotten, or more likely, covered up.
What she wants us to sit with
Five hundred years of the same argumentThe novel depicts variolation, an early Chinese practice in which smallpox scabs were ground up and blown through a tube into the nose to confer immunity. As See wrote those scenes during 2020, the debates her characters were having sounded familiar. Readers who noticed the echo asked the wrong question.
I have had readers say, ‘Well, did you take the language of today and apply it to what was going on back then?’ And it’s exactly the opposite. It’s just what people were saying 500 years ago was exactly the same arguments again, pro and con.
The parallel holds beyond public health debates. See places reproductive experience at the center of what women across five centuries actually share, regardless of rank, and draws a direct line from the Ming dynasty to the present.
All the women of different ranks in history are living very different lives, but when it comes down to our reproduction, it doesn’t matter if you’re the empress or a servant. You’re still going to get your period, you’re still going to go through years of fertility and years of menopause. And the thing we all share is that men have been wanting to control our experiences from Day 1. We see that happening right now across our country.
The title itself is where she locates the book’s final claim. The circle Tan forms is not organized or declared; it accumulates around her medicine and her need, and See wants readers to recognize it as something they are already building in their own lives.
To me, a lot of the story is about how she formed, not even realizing it, how she’s forming this circle of women where she can take care of them, but they’re also taking care of her. And I mean that not just physically but emotionally as well. And I think we all try to find that in our lives today.