Chiung Yao - Life

Life

Both her father (陳致平) and mother (袁行恕) received a good education. She was born in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. In 1949, along with her family, she moved to Taiwan, where she attended 臺北師範附小 and Taipei Municipal Zhong Shan Girls High School (臺北市立中山女子高級中學). At the age of 16, she published her first novel. During high school she had published over 200 articles. After graduation from high school and failure to enter college, she got married and became a housewife, and at the same time started her writing career. Her first novel, still often read today, is Chuangwai ("Outside the Window").

Chiung Yao's romance novels were very well received in Taiwan when they were first published, and by the 1990s she was also one of the best-selling authors on the mainland. Her novels feature women who would go through years of intense psychological suffering for the sake of love, with male leads who are often weaker than the female protagonists. Oftentimes the novels are set in the early Republican era, when family dictums were feudalistic and chauvinistic. Princess Pearl is the first of her many novels which ended happily for her female protagonists.

However her romance novels have also been criticized for their melodramatic plotlines and extremely longwinded dialogues.