Lady Tan's Circle of Women

Inspired by the true story of Tan Yunxian, a woman physician in fifteenth-century China. As a girl in a scholarly family, Yunxian is taught the largely forbidden art of women's medicine by her grandmother, and forms a deep friendship with Meiling, a midwife's daughter—a bond that endures even after Yunxian is married into a strict household where a respectable wife is not meant to work. Across decades, through childbirth, loss, and the rigid expectations of Ming society, Yunxian defies the limits placed on women to become a renowned doctor who records her cases in a book still studied centuries later. A sweeping novel of female friendship and quiet defiance from Lisa See.