The author of fiction, memoirs, whimsical prose essays and film scripts, Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995) is now a canonical figure in the literary history of twentieth-century China. Since C.T. Hsia in 1961 anointed her ‘the best and most important writer in Chinese today’, her reputation has only grown. Chang’s central position in the canon has also been consolidating geographically since the 1980s when ‘Eileen Chang fever’ reached the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from Hong Kong, Taiwan and diaspora, and the PRC cultural establishment began to retrieve her from the category of political undesirables in which she had long languished. In world literature her status has risen in recent decades due to the sustained production of translations and adaptations, for example Ang Lee’s acclaimed film Lust, Caution (2007). At the pinnacle of contemporary academic interest in Republican literature, her only competitor is Lu Xun (whom she may even be superseding in the Anglosphere).