The book is based on Cao's family. It is meant to be a memorial to the women that he met when he was young, including friends, relatives and servants. This novel is thought to be one of the first feminist novels. It is also one of the first novels to be written in vernacular, not classical, Chinese. This means that it was written in the same way people spoke at the time, rather than in a posh way. This helped to make vernacular Chinese an acceptable way of writing literature.