But I never learned to waltz: the "real" and imagined education of a courtesan in the late Qing.

This article illustrates the complex web of agency, voice, compliance, and resistance that men and women alike wove and unraveled in (re)presenting fictional and nonfictional versions of the education and the life-cycle of courtesans at the turn of last century. On the one hand, it shows how Chinese male novelists appropriate the long-standing cliche of the courtesan to expand (albeit in a limited way) and exoticize the horizons of female subjectivity. On the other hand, it reveals how, thanks to the explosive development of print culture begun in the late nineteenth century, the courtesan herself could step in to redefine those horizons and to problematize her role as a "modern" heroine.