Tale of East-West love affair leads to a literary row

The Bloomsbury Set has been making trouble again, this time in China, and as usual it is about sex.

Two London-based members of the Chinese literary world have fallen out over a thinly disguised work portraying an affair between Julian Bell, the son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a brilliant star in the firmament of 1930s literary China.

Ling's daughter, Chen Xiaoying, 67, a translator and broadcaster, was so appalled by what she felt were offensive and pornographic descriptions of her mother in the book, K: The Art of Love, that she has doggedly pursued the author, Hong Ying, through the courts.

Although both are British citizens living in London, Chen resorted to Chinese courts because British law, like most other Western legal systems, only protects the reputations of people as long as they are alive.

China's Confucian traditions permit lawsuits to defend a dead relative's reputation within three generations of their death. Close relatives have the right to sue for compensation if they suffer mental anguish by seeing the deceased's reputation or privacy violated.

A court in Changchun, north-east China, decided in favour of Chen last month after a one-day trial in June. It banned the book and ordered Hong to pay Chen £7,500 plus costs and to publish an apology to her ancestors.

"Hong Ying did stress that she was writing a 'pure novel' ... but she may have forgotten that she based her novel on true events, both in the preface she wrote for the edition in Taiwan and in the Changchun-based magazine Chinese writers," said Fu Guangming, an academic who has acted as Chen's representative in the affair.

Hong based the book on Julian Bell's letters and journals, which she found in London and used the story as a vehicle to dissect an East-West love affair. In particular, it draws on a fascination with the Daoist love-making techniques which the heroine uses so skilfully that she exhausts the younger man.

In his writings, Bell used letters in alphabetical order to represent the women he has slept with, hence the title.

The book was first published in Taiwan but has since been translated into Swedish, French and Dutch as well as English.

The book describes how Bell taught English literature at Wuhan and started an affair with a 35-year-old poet, Lin, who is married to the university dean. The dean is presented not only as a cuckold but as cold and impotent. Together, Bell and Lin start a wild affair which includes visiting an opium den in Peking where they indulge in a threesome. Bell eventually forsakes her and goes off to take part in the Spanish Civil War, where he is killed. "Lin is one of the very few women at that time to shake off the shackles of traditional ideas. She should be considered a heroine of feminism," Hong said.

Although Hong now denies that Lin is Ling, Chen says she recognises places, dates and events from her mother's life. Now 40, Hong was born in Chongqing but has lived in Britain since 1991 with her husband who lectures in Chinese literature at the University of London. She has published 13 books including her memoir, A Daughter of the River, and Summer of Betrayal, about China's 1989 pro-democracy movement.

"The best way I can fight back is to show that I am a good writer, no matter what punishment and humiliation I could be subject to," said Hong. Furious with the court's decision, she is treating the verdict as a test case for artistic freedom in China and said she intends to appeal and to ignore the court's order to apologise.

The case has caused a stir in China for different reasons. The court's verdict might circumscribe how far a writer can go in creating a work based on anecdotes and stories about historical figures.

In addition, Chinese readers have become fascinated by the books, the lives and romances of a group of 1930s writers such as Xu Zhimo, Lao She, Lin Huiyin, Xiao Qian who became friends with Forster, Woolf, Strachey, Roger Fry and the rest.

These Chinese writers returned from sojourns abroad to espouse an independent art-for-art's-sake attitude in contrast to a rival group of left-wing artists organised by the Chinese Communist Party.

In the 1950s, the party persecuted the romantics and aesthetes, banning their writings. Now the positions have reversed.

Most of the books written by the Marxists are out of fashion while the poetry of men such as Xu Zhimo fascinate the new generation and their lives are the subject of films and television dramas.