Ding Ling

Ding Ling, pseudonym of Jiang Wei, was one of China’s most popular 20th-century authors. In her early career Ding Ling initially wrote highly successful short stories centring on young, unconventional Chinese women. About 1930, with a distinct change in her artistic tendency, she became a major literary figure of the “leftist” literature.

Influenced by contemporary Chinese literary works and foreign literary masterpieces such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and other European novels, Ding Ling began writing partly autobiographical short stories in which she developed a new kind of Chinese heroine—daring, independent, and passionate, yet perplexed and emotionally unfulfilled in her search for the meaning of life. Her chronicles of the aspirations and disappointments of modern Chinese women were an immediate success.