SOURCE: "Pearl Buck Recreates the Last Empress of China," in Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, April 1, 1956, pp. 1-2.

In the following review, Butcher asserts that only Pearl Buck could have written Imperial Woman.

Perhaps in all of history there never was a woman whose life was more of her own making, whose power was more absolute, whose fate was more spectacular than the life pattern of Tzu Hsi, the mortal woman so revered that she was called "The Old Buddha" and worshipped as a living god. The world knows much from books of other great empresses, like Catherine II of Russia and Victoria of England, and of the many court favorites whose hands guided history through the men who succumbed to their beauty, their wit, or their intelligence [or a combination of those qualities]. But no one, before Pearl Buck wrote Imperial Woman, has told fully the...