This book project began in 1991 when Patricia Laurence, a scholar of Virginia Woolf, encountered a collection of unpublished letters and papers belonging to some members of the Bloomsbury Group and to Ling Shuhua, a renowned modern Chinese woman writer. Although some scholars have read and responded to the materials Laurence used in this book, her expansive coverage, freely traversing the boundaries of time, nation and artistic genres, is exceptional.

The work deals mainly with the intercultural communications between Chinese and British intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century, particularly those between the modernist literary ‘communities’ of the Crescent Moon Group and Bloomsbury. The work is the outcome of the author's dedicated research on the subject over ten years, ever since her discovery of the letters, which motivated her to learn the Chinese language and to attend lectures and seminars in modern Chinese literature.