China as I see it: The resident writing of British women in China, 1890--1940

This dissertation examines the writings of eight British women---Florence Ayscough, Ann Bridge, Dorothea Hosie, Emily Kemp, Alicia Bewicke Little, Annie Parsons, Charlotte Tippet, and Dora Wedlock---who resided in and wrote about China between 1890 and 1940. This fifty-year period was a tumultuous time in Britain's semicolonial relationship with China, beginning with increasing anti-foreign violence that lead to the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and ending with the Japanese invasion of China and the internment of British residents during World War II. The ambiguity and uncertainty of the British-Chinese relationship is reflected in the writings of these eight British residents, who came from a variety of backgrounds, resided in China for different reasons, wrote in various genres, and held differing opinions on the subject of Britain's actual and ideal relationship with China. Yet, underlying these important differences, the eight women in this study shared the conviction that, as British residents of China, their perspective of China and of the British presence in China was different from the perspective of the visiting travel writer or the academic Sinologist. As participants, however active, in the semicolonial relationship between the two countries, these eight writers felt they had special insight into that relationship. Moreover, as women writers, they were both complicit with and potential critics of a semicolonial system dominated by men. Foreign residents in a sovereign nation, women in an expatriate culture dominated by men, these writers saw themselves as outsiders---observers of a culture generally portrayed as quite unlike and alien to their home culture. On the other hand, as residents in a country under significant British influence, they could also claim an insider's perspective on both the Chinese and the resident British communities. Each writer in this study positions herself as an authority on China because, rather than in spite, of these complicated and ambiguous subject positions. Although recent studies have tended to categorize resident writers with travel writers, this study will demonstrate that these women's residential status gave their writing a perceived authority that is different from the authority claimed by visiting travel writers.