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Admired by contemporaries in China and by Bloomsbury Group writers, including Virginia Woolf, Ling Shuhua was a pioneering feminist and mistress of the short story form. She wrote about women navigating the tension between social expectations and personal desire, capturing their inner worlds with profound empathy. Whether portraying the struggles of the illiterate poor or the educated elite, Ling’s stories explore universal themes of love, pain and quiet resistance.
Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) also known as Su-hua Ling Chen, was born in Beijing, the daughter of the concubine of a high-ranking imperial official, Ling Fupeng, who later served as the mayor of Beijing. Unusually well-educated, Ling Shuhua was active and influential in Beijing literary and artistic circles as a young woman. As was the case with others of her contemporaries, she read and admired Western writers, for instance, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov. Ling was married to Chen Yuan, also known as Chen Xiying, the academic and critic, and they had one daughter Chen Xiaoying, also known as Ying Chinnery (she married the late Professor John Chinnery).

During the Second World War, Chen Yuan lived in the UK, before moving to Paris to represent the Republic of China at UNESCO. In 1947, Ling also left China and the couple settled in Europe. In 1953, Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published her autobiography written in English, Ancient Melodies, with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West. After its publication, Ling began work on a novel, also in English, which she hoped Hogarth Press would publish, but had made little progress by the time Leonard Woolf died in 1969. She then abandoned the project and devoted herself mainly to painting, though during her later years she wrote some essays in Chinese.
Nicky Harman's translation of ‘Writing a Letter’ appeared in The Shanghai Literary Review in 2024 and can be read here.