Book description
From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the
daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China.
Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million
people. Marina Warner's biography lays bare her complex personality: her
extreme conventionalism; her hatred of "foreigners"; her
passion for power and intrigue; her vanity and her delight in ritual;
her extravagance and corruption and her love of gardens, painting and
the theatre. THE DRAGON EMPRESS also portrays a China in rapid decline
as poverty, civil war and foreign exploitation and invasion brought
about the fall of the Ch'ing dynasty.
Marina Warner was born in London of an Italian mother and an English
father. Her history and criticism has focused mainly on female
symbolism - Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the
Virgin Mary; Joan of Arc: the Image of Female Heroism; Monuments and
Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form - and is currently
finishing a study of fairytale, called From The Beast to The
Blonde. She has also written novels. The Lost Father was
a Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and winner of the
Macmillan Silver P. E.N Award. She has recently published The
Mermaids in the Basement her first collection of short stories.
She lives in London with her husband, the artist John Dewe Mathews,
and one son.
