[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 amazing story of the life of the last empress of China.

Imperial Woman is a novel which probably no other pen in the world today except Pearl Buck's could have produced. No Chinese writer could have written it dispassionately, nor could anyone who had not lived in China and absorbed, with the air she breathed, its ways of life and thought and action. And probably no man would have seen the heroine of this historic novel in the revealing light in which Pearl Buck shows her, driven by relentless ambition, often ruthlessly and often uselessly cruel, and yet true [after her fashion] to the one love of her life.

This fabulous heroine starts as almost a drudge in the household of an uncle who, when her father died, had taken her and her mother into the family quarters. She was deeply in love with her kinsman, Jung Lu, but, because she was beautiful and a Manchu maiden, she was sent with her cousin to the imperial court as a concubine. Her own cousin was the imperial consort, she merely a prisoner in the imperial palace until one day the weakling emperor summoned her and from that moment was under her spell.

The imperial consort's child was a weakling girl, but when her own was a son who, the author suggests, was her lover's, not the emperor's, her power began and never until she died in her seventies did it really fail. It tottered precariously, however, many times; when the weakling emperor died; during her years of regency for her son, who became emperor; in treacherous days just before and after his death; in the regency of her nephew, whom she put upon the imperial throne; and most seriously when China was invaded by angry foreign troops protesting the massacre of their nationals, the foreigners whom the Old Buddha hated.

The history of these 46 years of absolutism of the Old Buddha is a panoramic background for an intimately detailed study of Manchu imperial life lived against it. It is also an intimate study of a beautiful, imperious woman who was an enigma even to herself at times, cruel with much of mankind but a lover of helpless animals and birds, a poet, an artist, a musician sensitive to beauty but often as cold of heart as one of the marble bridges which she insisted on building.

Pearl Buck's descriptions of fabrics, of embroidery, of jewels, of golden and bronze chrysanthemums in a courtyard are so vivid that one can almost feel the golden dragons on the imperial yellow satin or the cooling comfort of a piece of jade held in the hand on a hot day.

Everyone, of course, will want to know whether Imperial Woman is as great a book as The Good Earth. That is a question which each reader will answer himself. That it is the great obverse of her literary medallion of a China of the past everyone will agree.