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This chapter focuses on “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) and “Red Rose, White Rose” (1944), stories that were produced at a time when China was in the midst of Japanese invasion and occupation, so that the standard cultural norms did not operate totally under the usual social constraints. The central male characters in these stories, Liuyuan and Zhenbao, were considered “ideal modern Chinese men”. However, Eileen Chang reveals that despite the social acclaim they both receive from their good social positions and university educations, their gentlemanly image is only a veneer. Their self-seeking behaviour is no different from those of other men who have never been abroad.

This chapter adds race to the complications of gender politics in Red Rose/White Rose (1994). Writing in a lucid, satirical, yet profoundly humanistic style that one could call “postrealist,” Eileen Chang’s 1942 story illustrates the sexual and ideological confusions of a Western-educated Chinese man, Tong Zhenbao, as he oscillates between two self-images: an exalted manly colonist and an emasculated colonized subject. In his adaptation, Stanley Kwan—one of the most important directors of the Hong Kong New Wave—picks up on Chang’s fine-grained study of the power relationships involved in seeing and being seen. Taken together, Chang’s mixed-media fiction and Kwan’s literary adaptation propose a more diverse and symbiotic future for Chinese culture.

In her second postwar novel, H.D. creates a layered historical narrative of the wars and uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century; the Crusades of the Middle Ages; and, implicitly, the Second World War and the partitioning of India and Pakistan. A story of Elizabeth Siddall and the Pre-Raphaelites, the novel relies upon the historical backdrop of the Crimean War and the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India to destabilize the narrative and to emphasize a series of dismemberments of female bodies. Siddall and India itself are fragmented, abstracted, and aetherialized to the point of nonexistence.

This chapter portrays the couple’s reconnection. Pearson motivated them to gather all their letters and works for Yale University. H.D. polished Sword Went Out to Sea, her novel about Dowding, that included “Summerdream,” displaying her recovery. It describes séances, and the soldiers who wrote “letters from the dead.” Deviating from Dowding’s saccharine version of the afterlife, she wanted “rebirth” on earth, “resurrection-reality.” She moved between Lausanne and Lugano, picked by Bryher for warmth and quaintness, proximate to Hermann Hesse’s house. Violet Hunt’s Wife of Rossetti, which H.D. gave her the title for, catalyzed her to retell Elizabeth Siddal’s story and suicide, resulting not solely from an abusive lover (Rossetti), who she likened to Pound, but also from war terror, and imported Morris as co-creator with Siddal. In Florence with Pearson, Bryher worked on The Fourteenth of October, comparing the Norman Conquest to World War II.