Chinese · 1084–1155
Li Qingzhao was born into a literary family in Shandong and at eighteen married Zhao Mingcheng, with whom she spent twenty years collecting bronzes, rubbings and rare books and cataloguing them. In 1127 the Jurchen armies took the northern capital; the couple fled south with what they could carry, most of the collection was lost or stolen, and Zhao died of fever in 1129 while travelling to a new post. She remarried briefly and disastrously at about fifty, sued her second husband for fraud, and went to prison for the suit, since a wife who accused her husband was jailed regardless of the verdict. Her afterword to her husband's catalogue of inscriptions is one of the great pieces of Chinese autobiographical prose. Around fifty of her ci lyrics survive out of a much larger body, and she is by common consent the finest woman poet in Chinese and one of the finest writers in the form, plain in vocabulary and merciless about loss.