Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes

"Laurence's book is required reading for anyone interested in modernism and postmodernism."—University Press Book Review

"Patricia Laurence has written a fascinating book that serves the growing interest in the literary and cultural relations between England and China. Here the emphasis is on the Bloomsbury writers and their neglected yet important intellectual relations with China as well as those of Chinese writers with England. Laurence tells the story of Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew and Vanessa Bell's son, so soon to die in the Spanish Civil War, and his affair with Ling Shuhua, a member of the Crescent Moon group (the Chinese 'Bloomsbury') and the wife of his dean at Wuhan University. Using this love story and Ling's later connections with Bloomsbury as the centerpiece of her study, Laurence investigates the cultural connections between the two countries, a colorful structure consisting of architecture, porcelain, and art, but mostly writers. It is a rich tale, told with critical acumen"—Peter Stansky, Department of History, Stanford University, and author of On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World

"Any Virginia Woolf lover and Bloomsbury fan would appreciate this exquisite narrative of careers and lives of the modern Chinese writers and poets whose Crescent Moon group paralleled the English group in time and spirit. Storytelling at its best, a sensitive account of romance between Julian Bell and Ling Shuhua adds flavor to how the Chinese and the English men and women of letters interacted."—Timothy Tung, retired, City College, City University of New York

"The cross-cultural voyage that Patricia Laurence has undertaken in this book is awesome. With immense scholarly detail and personal passion, Laurence maps aesthetic relationships between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group in Beijing between 1900 and 1949. She criss-crosses brilliantly from letters and diaries to fiction and the visual arts, from biography to theory, and back again. This groundbreaking study urges us to draw a new map of international modernism appropriate to our own, fully globalized world."—Makiko Minow-Pinkney, author of Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject