SOURCE: "Inside the Forbidden City," in New York Herald Tribune, January 1, 1956, p. 1.

In the following review, Bellows discusses the difficulties of developing a fictional story around an historical figure, and how Buck approaches the problem in her Imperial Woman.

General events in the Chinese Empire from the early 1850's to the early 1900's are now a matter of history. What went on in the separate world inside the walls of the Forbidden City is less well known and subject to conjecture and dispute. What went on in the mind of Tzu Hsi, Empress Dowager of China, strong ruler and unpredictable woman, is anybody's guess and a challenge to the imagination. She was not a person to share her private thoughts with another, or to leave a record of them; and any attempt to cast her as the point-of-view character in a novel must necessarily be a matter for...