Ding Ling

One of the most important — and most turbulent — literary lives of twentieth-century China. Ding Ling (丁玲) burst onto the scene in the late 1920s with Miss Sophie's Diary, a shockingly frank portrayal of female desire that scandalized the literary establishment and electrified young readers. The novella's first-person narration of a woman's sexual longing was unprecedented in Chinese fiction.

Ding Ling's life was as dramatic as her fiction: she joined the Communist revolution, was imprisoned by the Nationalists, rose to become China's most prominent literary figure, and was then persecuted during successive political campaigns. She spent decades in internal exile before her rehabilitation. Through it all, her early work retained its power — Miss Sophie's Diary remains a foundational text of modern Chinese feminist literature, as bold and necessary as the day it was written.