Madame Wu

Madame Wu is the novel’s central character and protagonist. At the novel’s beginning, she is celebrating her fortieth birthday by deliberately and thoughtfully moving herself, both physically and emotionally, into the next phase of her life: she moves out of the living space she shares with her husband (see “Mr. Wu” below), arranges for his sexual needs to be taken care of by a concubine (see “Ch’iuming”, below), and begins a process of emotional and spiritual withdrawal from the world that, over the course of the story, takes her in some unexpected but rewarding directions.

Throughout the book, and over the course of her transformation from austerely gentle autocrat to compassionately authoritative contemplative, she retains several consistent characteristics. She is thoughtful and intellectual (in a time and place in which women were expected to be little more than docile son incubators), almost supernaturally insightful...