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I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

— Amy Tan

Sentiment: POSITIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.

— Amy Tan

I'm very curious to witness the historic transformation of Chinese women.

— Yang Lan

I was shocked, and I ended up contacting three academics to find out if it could possibly be that my grandmother was a courtesan.

— Amy Tan

You'll find a lot of rich detail in people's personal histories - diaries and journals and things of the era.

— Ransom Riggs

I think I'm living in the wrong century. I would have made a great courtesan. Not a mistress - I could never be kept - but a courtesan with my own rules.

— Marie Helvin

One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.

— Susanna Kearsley

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

— Natasha Trethewey

✗Opposing Perspectives

She told fortunes for a living. It's a wacky book and was great fun to write. It is very much a look at what life was like for women in Australia in the 1960's.

— Colleen McCullough

When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

— Susanna Kearsley

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

— Amy Tan