Jin Yi (, courtesy name Xianxian 纖纖; 1770–1794) was a Qing dynasty poet from Suzhou.Ming Qing Women Writers' Database Born into a local gentry family, she demonstrated remarkable talent at a very young age, and surpassed all her brothers when learning to compose poetry.Yang Binbin, "A Disease of Passion: The Self-Iconizing Project of an Eighteenth Century Chinese Woman Poet, Jin Yi," p. 66 Considered one of the most talented students of Yuan Mei, 108 of her poems were included in his anthology of works by his female students, the Suiyuan nüdizi shixuan.Shang Wei, "The Literati Era and Its Demise" in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, edited by Steven Owen and Kang-i Sun Chang. Cambridge, 2010, pp. 263–264.Fong, Grace S.; Widmer, Ellen, The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing In his eulogy of Jin Yi, Yuan Mei wrote: "At a very early age she could already read books and distinguish the four tones. She loved to compose poetry, and every time she let fall her brush it was like a fleet horse prancing along unable to talk."Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, edited by Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 485–487Hu Wenkai 胡文楷, Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歴代婦女箸作考, SHanghai, 1985, pp. 407, 433–434. A contemporary Qing poet, Wang Zhenyi, considered her to be an emblematic "banished immortal" (謫仙, zhexian), akin to Li Bai. Jin Yi's complete collection of poetic works in four volumes was titled Shouyinlou Shicao (瘦吟樓詩草, "Poetry Drafts from the Tower of the Slender Reciter").Yang Binbin, "A Disease of Passion: The Self-Iconizing Project of an Eighteenth Century Chinese Woman Poet, Jin Yi," pp. 66, 68
Her poetic skills are said to have greatly pleased her husband, Chen Ji 陳基, on their wedding night; her "poetic companionship" was an important aspect of their marriage.Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 485. An important theme in Jin Yi's poetry was chronic illness, which was the cause of Jin's early death at twenty-five. The languor and travail of illness became a major part of Jin's deliberate self-presentation to the world as a suffering, brilliant woman poet, an image popular at the time. Jin turned her literal illness into a metaphorical wasting at the hands of her passions, consciously giving greater meaning to her struggles with illness. She subverted traditional propriety with a degree of sensuality in her poems contemporarily considered "unbecoming" of a gentry wife.Yang Binbin, "A Disease of Passion: The Self-Iconizing Project of an Eighteenth Century Chinese Woman Poet, Jin Yi."
On her deathbed, she wrote a poem on the novel Dream of the Red Chamber,Ellen Widmer The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China Cambridge, Massachusetts,: Harvard East Asia Center, 2006, pp. 141–142. identifying herself as a sort of real-life Lin Daiyu.Yang Binbin, "A Disease of Passion: The Self-Iconizing Project of an Eighteenth Century Chinese Woman Poet, Jin Yi," pp. 75–76
Some of her poetry has been translated into English.Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 485–487The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China Cambridge, Massachusetts,: Harvard East Asia Center, 2006, pp. 141–142.Yang Binbin, "A Disease of Passion: The Self-Iconizing Project of an Eighteenth Century Chinese Woman Poet, Jin Yi."
References
External links Chinese texts of some of Jin Yi's poems may be found at Ming Qing Women Writers' Database