[4] In 1939, Chang was accepted to the University of London on a full scholarship, but was unable to attend due to World War II.

Instead, she studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she met her lifelong friend, Fatima Mohideen (炎櫻; died 1995).

[2] In 1956, while living in MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, Chang met and became involved with the American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, a Philadelphia native nearly 30 years her senior.

[8] According to her friends, Chang had died of natural causes several days before her building manager discovered her body, after becoming alarmed that she had not answered her telephone.

"[9] In 2015, Roland Soong handed Eileen Chang's manuscripts to Hong Kong scholar Rosanna Fong (馮睎乾) for organization and research.

While in high school, Chang read Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which influenced her work throughout her career.

[5] She was known for her “aesthetic ambivalence” where the narrative style and language were reminiscent of the traditional “linked-chapter” novel while the setting was more in line with modern urban melodramas.

Within the next two years, she wrote some of her most acclaimed works, including Love in a Fallen City (Qing Cheng Zhi Lian, 傾城之戀) and The Golden Cangue (1943).

[16] During this time, she wrote two anti-communist works,The Rice-Sprout Song (Yang Ge, 秧歌) and Naked Earth (Chidi zhi lian, 赤地之戀, sometimes known in English as Love in Redland),[17] both of which she later translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan.

[16] According to academic Brian DeMare, the book is a consequence of the anti-Communist paranoia of the United States Cold War mentality and lacks the poetry and nuance of Chang's other works.

[19] She also translated a variety of English works into Chinese, most notably The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.

Betrayal is an overarching theme in Chang's later works, notably in her English essay "A Return to the Frontier" (1963) and one of her last novels Little Reunions (2009, published posthumously).

[22] In 1962, when she resided in San Francisco, Chang started writing the English novel "The Young Marshal" based on the love story between the Chinese general Zhang Xueliang and his wife, Zhao Yidi, with an aim to break into the American literary world.

However, due to the multitude of Chinese names and complex historical background in the book, her editor gave a less favorable evaluation of the initial chapters, which greatly undermined Chang's confidence in the writing.

In 2014, Eileen Chang's literary executor, Roland Soong, managed to have the unfinished "The Young Marshal" published, with a Chinese translation by Zheng Yuantao.

In 1975, she completed the English translation of "The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai," a late Qing novel written in Wu Chinese by Han Bangqing.

In 1978, Crown Magazine published "Lust, Caution", “Xiang Jian Huan”(相見歡) and “Fu Hua Lang Rui”(浮花浪蕊), all written by Eileen Chang.

She sought to recount the seemingly irrelevant details and experiences of daily life of ordinary men and women in periods of social change and violence.

Chang was also known for her view of modern history, displaying colours, lines, and moods in her writing and juxtaposition of historical reality with the domain of domesticity.

[32] With collective efforts to unearth the literary histories of the pre-revolutionary days in the post-Mao era, a renewed Eileen Chang “fever” swept through the streets of mainland China.

[2] Other notable Mainland China authors influenced by Chang include Wang Anyi, Su Tong, and Ye Zhaoyan.

[32] Chang has been listed as one of the four women literary geniuses in Shanghai during the Republic of China era, alongside Su Qing, Guan Lu, and Pan Liudai.

Chang has also been listed as one of the four women literary geniuses during the Republic of China era, along with Lü Bicheng, Xiao Hong and Shi Pingmei.

[33] Dominic Cheung, a poet and professor of East Asian languages at the University of Southern California, said that had it not been for the Chinese civil war, Chang would have been a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The best known is probably Ang Lee's film Lust, Caution (2007), based on her novella of the same name, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Tang Wei.

[34] A 20-episode TV series, The Legend of Eileen Chang, written by Wang Hui-ling and starring Rene Liu, was aired in Taiwan in 2004.

Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun includes quotations and themes from Chang's writings and life in his novel Daughter.