Eileen Chang occupies a unique position in modern Chinese literature. She was a popular writer with enduring appeal whose work has inspired successive generations. As a young woman in her mid-twenties, she wrote her most acclaimed stories in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The popularity of these works has seen major revivals in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and since the 19802, in the Chinese mainland where her work had been banned. When she died in 1995, she had achieved near-cult status. | Writing in 1961, Professor C.T. Hsia called Eileen Chang 'the best and most important writer in Chinese today [whose] short stories invite valid comparisons with, and in some respects claim superiority over, the work of serious modern women writers in English'.