Lu Yin (1898–1934) is a notable early-twentieth-century Chinese writer whose career and popularity spanned the 1920s. Her writings, however, never made it to the pantheon of twentieth-century Chinese literary history. She was known rather as a prolific and lyrical lamenter of the sad fate of the nascent “New Woman” of her generation, and for her own tragic life and death, until her rediscovery at the end of the century as a pioneer of a modern Chinese women’s literary tradition. Lu Yin was in fact one of the earliest published authors of modern Chinese vernacular literature. She was an active participant of the New Culture Movement (1915–1927), also known as the May Fourth because of its climactic student protest on 4 May 1919, which is celebrated for its fervent pursuit of an iconoclastic cultural modernity and radical literary, aesthetic experimentation, for ushering in a modern Chinese “self” then subsumed in subsequent political national modernisation projects. The canonised May Fourth writers, male in most instances, are celebrated for their initiation of a socially engaged, thus Realist modern national literature. Even though modernist resonances are also prominent in their fiction and poetry, highlighting historical aesthetic dissonances with the modernities they pursue, these were considered merely experiments in a cultural and formal Occidentalism for the movement’s iconoclastic ends (i.e. towards a lineal, one-directional cultural nation-building). Lu Yin’s intensely personal, internalised, and lyrical novellas, poems, and short stories circa 1922 eulogise and at the same time prevaricate the emerging modern Chinese female self. This chapter suggests that her oeuvre, centring on the ennui and psychological stasis of the New Woman and permeated with a relentlessly gendered poetics of the “self,” can only be understood in relation to the May Fourth movement and Chinese modernisms writ large.