Murasaki Shikibu
Japanese novelist and poet (c.973-c.1014) · Japan · Writers · Lived 970 to 1100 · aged 130
Murasaki Shikibu is read about 1,273 times a day, in 146 languages.
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Something wrong?She wrote what many consider the world's first novel - a sprawling court romance composed in Japanese around the year 1000, when women of her class were barred from learning the written language of power.
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, So all they see of me is a façade.
To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman.
It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority.
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Born into an erudite household around 973, Murasaki learned Chinese despite the prohibition, showing a precocious fluency her father's world valued but her gender wasn't meant to access. She married in her twenties, bore a daughter, and was widowed after two years - likely the period when she began drafting The Tale of Genji. Around 1005, her literary reputation brought an invitation to serve Empress Shōshi at the Imperial court, where she continued writing and wove scenes from palace life into her work. After five or six years she withdrew with the empress to Lake Biwa. Within a decade of Genji's completion it had spread through the provinces; within a century it was canonical, the subject of scholarly commentary and the spark for centuries of Japanese illustration.
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