Content area
Full Text
Abstract: The manuscripts of a developing autobiography and the letters exchanged between Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua have been misunderstood. Critics often broach Woolf's mentorship when discussing their correspondence. They hold that Woolf's advice and guidance contributed to the creation and composition of Ling's autobiography, Ancient Melodies (1953). Ling has, then, either been characterized as an exemplification of Eurocentric assumptions of modernist tutelage or has been assimilated into a paradigm of influence dominant in global modernist studies. Drawing on unpublished materials related to the Ling-Woolf correspondence in the archives at the University of Sussex, the New York Public Library, and King's College, Cambridge, this article offers a revisionary account of a scholarly consensus that sees Woolf as a modernist master through her putative intellectual and literary influence on Ling. In repudiating the legitimization of Ling as a minor modernist figure, who owes the inception and development of her autobiography to Woolf, this paper also rethinks cross-cultural literary relations in the twentieth century by redirecting the critical emphasis on high-energy transnational interactions to episodes of less dynamic exchanges.
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
Introduction: Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua Today
The Chinese and British exhibition (18 November 2022-23 April 2023) at the British Library is the first extensive project to feature Chinese painter and writer, Ling Shuhua, within the matrix of twentieth-century Sino-British relations. Previous exhibitions included Chinese Paintings by Ling Su-Hua (1949) at Bath's Adam Gallery; А Chinese Painter's Choice: Some Paintings from the 14th to the 20th Century from the Collection of Ling Su-hua (1967) at London's Arts Council Gallery; Ling Suhua: A Chinese Painter and her Friends (1983) at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and Solo Exhibition: Ling Shuhua (1984) at John Herron Art Museum, Indianapolis.
When I visited Chinese and British in February 2023, I was hoping to come across new information on Ling's relationship with one of her English contemporaries, Virginia Woolf. There are two items related to Woolf and Ling. Kept in a showcase are a facsimile of one of Woolf's letters to Ling and the first two pages of Ling's autobiography Ancient Melodies (1953), written in English. An accompanying nying label
reads: Ling Shuhua was a modernist writer and painter who shared a connection with the influential Bloomsbury...