Gimpel has admirably stitched together a narrative by sifting through Chen’s extant writings, archival materials at her undergraduate alma mater Vassar College, the accounts of family and friends, and so on.... Gimpel’s refreshing approach enables her to explore Chen’s life, and see her in perspective relative to other intellectuals, without forcing her into an ideological pigeonhole.

Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China

Denise Gimpel has rendered here a compelling account of Chen Hengzhe, a key “bridge builder” between China and the West in modern China. A first in a number of important endeavors—first female professor at Peking University, one of the first writers of the New Literature, as well as an early explorer of Western scholarship—Chen has until now never received the attention she deserves. There is much pathos in the story of a woman who, for all the opportunities presented to her, was unable to take advantage of many of them. This work could not be more relevant to the study of contemporary China, where many of the same intractable issues confronting Chen have once again presented themselves to a new generation of Chinese intellectuals.

Theodore Huters, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Denise Gimpel’s book is a pioneering and thought-provoking study of Chen Hengzhe, China’s first university female professor (appointed in 1920), essayist, interpreter of western history, and cosmopolitan writer of vernacular fiction and poetry. Analyzing Chen’s ‘transnational life’ and multiple roles as an ‘agent of cultural translation’ during the crucial transition period between the end of the imperial monarchy and the advent of the Chinese People’s Republic, Gimpel illuminates her participation in the creation of new intellectual, institutional and textual ‘spaces’ as part of the quest to both ‘bring China into the world’ and ‘bring the world to China’. As such, Gimpel’s study will not only be of interest to literary, cultural and gender historians of twentieth-century China but also to those seeking the modern origins of China’s globalization.

Paul Bailey, University of Durham

Chen Hengzhe: A Life between Orthodoxies fills a significant gap in the study of modern Chinese cultural and intellectual history. Despite her status as China's first female university professor and China's first modern short story writer, Chen Hengzhe has never been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry. Dr Gimpel's exhaustively researched monograph, which analyses in depth both Chen's literary writings and her scholarly writings, has rectified this situation in a most convincing manner. Moving well beyond the confines of a conventional biography, Gimpel's study resurrects Chen Hengzhe as a hugely important figure among the US-educated elite of early twentieth-century China and a major participant in the translingual practices that make up Chinese modernity.

Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London