| Sumario: | The manuscripts of a developing autobiography and the letters exchanged between Virginia Woolf and Ling Shuhua have been misunderstood. Critics often broach Woolf’s mentorship when discussing their correspondence. They hold that Woolf’s advice and guidance contributed to the creation and composition of Ling’s autobiography, Ancient Melodies (1953). Ling has, then, either been characterized as an exemplification of Eurocentric assumptions of modernist tutelage or has been assimilated into a paradigm of influence dominant in global modernist studies. Drawing on unpublished materials related to the Ling-Woolf correspondence in the archives at the University of Sussex, the New York Public Library, and King’s College, Cambridge, this article offers a revisionary account of a scholarly consensus that sees Woolf as a modernist master through her putative intellectual and literary influence on Ling. In repudiating the legitimization of Ling as a minor modernist figure, who owes the inception and development of her autobiography to Woolf, this paper also rethinks cross-cultural literary relations in the twentieth century by redirecting the critical emphasis on high-energy transnational interactions to episodes of less dynamic exchanges.
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