'Katrina Gulliver's groundbreaking interdisciplinary study examines the way female writers of novels, non-fiction and diaries saw their gender at a time of modernization and crisis. Gulliver uses case studies of selected women, from Pearl S. Buck through Sophia Chen Zen to Uno Chiyo, in China and Japan between about 1920 and 1940, to explore responses to the social change. This book should appeal to students, scholars and general readers interested in gender, history, literature and culture East and West.' Jonathan Hart, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta