March 2025: Ling Shuhua 凌叔华

Admired by contemporaries in China and by Bloomsbury Group writers, including Virginia Woolf, Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) 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.

Bio from Paper Republic

For our featured author this month we have a bit of a change from our usual focus on newer and emerging writers, and are instead featuring the early 20th century author Ling Shuhua. This is to coincide with an exciting event we hosted at the University on International Women's Day - 8th March - with two longstanding friends and supporters of our Centre, translator Nicky Harman and author Yan Ge.

Nicky has been working on translations of Ling Shuhua's short stories, and we're delighted to be able to publish the talk that she gave at this Youtube link, introducing Ling Shuhua's fascinating life and work.

Her talk was followed by a creative writing workshop led by UK-based author and writing tutor Yan Ge, where participants had a go at their own life-writing, inspired by Ling Shuhua's work. The event was sponsored by the Royal Society of Literature, through a 'Literature Matters' Award.

For this month's story, we have Nicky's translation of Ling Shuhua's short story 'Boredom', which you can read both in translation and in the original Chinese.

Everything was boring. Boring, boring. As she repeated the words, she suddenly recalled someone admonishing her: ‘Anyone who says they’re bored and depressed is making a fuss about nothing. They’re just lazy.’ She had been struck by the truth of these words at the time; she had scolded herself more than once, and did so again today.

If you'd like to read more of Nicky's translations of Ling Shuhua's work, you can find the story 'Writing a Letter' in the Shanghai Literary Review, and the story 'Katherine' in Asymptote.

The rain stopped at dawn, and a mist descended over the trees in the valley. Amid the white-out, all that could be heard was the waves breaking on the beach, their steady rhythm seeming to promise a beautiful morning. 

And if you'd like to find out more about Yan Ge, who ran the writing workshop following Nicky's presentation, she's been featured on our Bookclub, and you can also read her short story 'Stockholm' in Granta magazine. The story is included in her collection Elsewhere, published by Faber and Faber.

And finally, participants in the creative writing workshop have the opportunity to submit their work for a competition judged by Yan Ge and Nicky Harman. We're looking forward to reading the stories that come out of the workshop and competition, and seeing the connections between writing lives in China in the 1930s, and the UK in the 2020s!