Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is Lisa See’s 2023 historical novel, set in fifteenth century Ming dynasty China and centered on the real historical figure of Tan Yunxian, one of the very few female physicians whose work was preserved in the Chinese medical tradition of her era. Yunxian was born into an elite scholar family in 1461 and was unusually trained in medicine by her grandmother, herself a respected physician, before going on to write her own medical text Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor that has survived to the present day.

The novel opens with Yunxian as a young girl, beginning her medical training under the patient guidance of her grandmother. Lisa See draws on the actual historical record and on extensive research into Ming dynasty Chinese medicine to render Yunxian’s training, her early practice, the social constraints that shaped what she could and could not do as a female physician, and the slowly developing network of female patients and friends who became her circle. The circle of women of the title is both the literal community of women whose health Yunxian served and the wider sisterhood of female knowledge that operated alongside the official male dominated medical tradition.

Lisa See has built her career on this kind of carefully researched Chinese historical fiction, with novels like Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, and The Island of Sea Women each exploring different chapters of Chinese and East Asian women’s experience that mainstream historical fiction had largely overlooked. Lady Tan’s Circle of Women continues this project with what is arguably her most ambitious historical reconstruction yet. The medical material is rendered with the kind of specificity that only extensive research could produce, and the social and cultural detail of Ming dynasty elite life is handled with care.

The novel works as both a portrait of a remarkable historical figure and as a meditation on female knowledge, female friendship, and the persistence of women’s intellectual contributions even within societies that have been organized to prevent them from being acknowledged. For readers who came to Lisa See through her earlier novels, this is one of her most accomplished works. For new readers, it is a strong introduction.