Biographies of Exemplary Women

Biographies of Exemplary Women

An 11th-century woodblock print of the book
Author	Liu Xiang
Original title	列女傳 (Liènǚ Zhuàn)
Country	Han Dynasty China
Language	Classical Chinese
Genre	Biography
Publication date	c. 18 BC

The Biographies of Exemplary Women (Chinese: 列女傳; pinyin: Liènǚ Zhuàn) is a book compiled by the Han Dynasty scholar Liu Xiang c. 18 BC. It includes 125 biographical accounts of exemplary women in ancient China, taken from early Chinese histories including Chun Qiu, Zuo Zhuan, and the Records of the Grand Historian. The book served as a standard Confucianist textbook for the moral education of women in traditional China for two millennia.

The idealized biographies are divided into eight scrolls, including the eighth addendum from an unknown editor, as shown below.

This book follows the lièzhuàn (列傳 "arrayed biographies") biographical format established by the Chinese historian Sima Qian. The word liènǚ (列女 "famous women in history") is sometimes understood as liènǚ (烈女 " women martyrs"), which Neo-Confucianists used to mean "woman who commits suicide after her husband's death rather than remarry; woman who dies defending her honor".

The online Chinese Text Initiative at the University of Virginia provides an e-text edition of the Lienu Zhuan, including both digitized Chinese content and images of a Song Dynasty woodblock edition with illustrations by Gu Kaizhi 顧凱之 (c. 344-405 CE) of the Jin Dynasty.