Xu Zhenya
1889–1937
Biography
Xu Zhenya (1889–1937) was a novelist from Changshu in Jiangsu and one of the best-known writers of the so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school. That school produced popular fiction in the early years of the twentieth century, most of it about love, marriage and romantic misfortune, written in a polished prose that owed much to classical style. He was also a member of the Southern Society, a literary group whose members wrote largely in the classical forms of poetry and prose.
His most famous novel is Yu li hun, usually rendered Jade Pear Spirit, which appeared in the early 1910s. It is a tragic love story in which a young widow and the man she loves are kept apart by family duty and by the conventions of the time. The book is written in an ornate, parallel-prose style, and its sentiment made it one of the most widely read novels of its period. Its popularity drew fire from the writers of the May Fourth movement, who attacked this school for sentimentality and for a classical manner they considered out of date.
The novel is on this site under the title Yu li hun. Read it as a document of its time: a best seller from the years when the Republic was new, and a window onto what urban readers wanted from fiction before the reformers of the following decade changed the rules of the literary field.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
玉梨魂
by 徐枕亞
A young widow, Bai Meiniang, and the tutor He Mengxia fall in love but are held apart by duty, and she urges him to marry her sister-in-law instead. Xu Zhenya's 1912 romance in ornate parallel prose was the bestseller of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.