Writers › Writer / Poet
Zhu Shuzhen
Song dynasty woman poet of Qiantang whose verse of an unhappy life survived only because Wei Zhonggong gathered it into the Heartbreak Collection
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Hao You Qi Ju Shi
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Zhu Shuzhen, who called herself the Recluse of Quiet Dwelling, came from Qiantang, or by another account Haining, and her life can be pieced together only from her poems and from Wei Zhonggong's preface. That preface to the Heartbreak Collection (Duanchang ji) says her parents chose her husband badly, marrying her to a commoner of the market streets, so that she lived and died frustrated and filled her poems with sorrow and resentment. After her death her parents burned her manuscripts; Wei, hearing her pieces recited at a travellers' inn, gathered what remained into the collection and dated his preface 1182. What survives is a book of poems and a smaller book of lyrics, mostly about solitary longing and the passing seasons. The lyric on the Lantern Festival to the tune Shengchazi also appears in the works of Ouyang Xiu; the Ming scholar Yang Shen was the first to credit it to her, and its authorship is still debated.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Song dynasty