ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a more comprehensive treatment of literary couples in Republican China and of the concomitant literary genre: the qingshu or love-letter. One of the pioneering studies in the field of Chinese literature, inspired by the antecedents of feminist criticism, quite naturally opened perspectives onto the literary field and also inquired into social parameters of women’s writing conditions. A gradually loosening moral rigorism concerning relationships between the sexes has helped pave the ground for making re-available a huge amount of sources, or even creating them, since there is a number of survivors from the early generations of May Fourth literature. In 1915, upon graduation at a Teachers’ College, Bai Wei left her home in Hunan Province to escape a proposed marriage and studied various subjects from literature to psychology, philosophy and aesthetics at Tokyo Women’s Normal University. For a number of partnerships that produced qingshu collections, literature has been the very point of departure.
