Eileen Chang

Born Zhang Ailing to a declining aristocratic family (her father an opium addict who once beat and imprisoned her, her mother a Westernized socialite often abroad), she studied literature at the University of Hong Kong until the Japanese invasion of 1941 sent her back to occupied Shanghai. She was writing bestselling fiction there within two years, still in her early twenties.

Her brief, disastrous marriage to Hu Lancheng, an official in the Japanese-backed collaborationist government, later shadowed her reputation, though it fed the espionage and betrayal of Lust, Caution, refined over decades into one of her most compressed works. Love in a Fallen City, written in the same wartime years, paired a divorcée's calculated romance with Hong Kong's fall to Japan.

She emigrated in 1955, eventually settling in Los Angeles, and died there in 1995 in near-total isolation: her body was not discovered for several days.