"Miss Sophia's Diary" was written in 1927 and first published in the influential Early Republic of China "Fiction Monthly" (小说月报).
Ding Ling named the main character after Sofia Perovskaya, a Russian revolutionary who was executed for orchestrating the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II.
[1] A major influence on the story was Ding Ling's personal experiences at that time, including depression, exhaustion, and impoverishment.
Dr. Tani E. Barlow describes Ding Ling in 1927 as "miserable, drinking heavily, dispirited by the national tragedy of political counterrevolution, and exhausted by her impoverished, often squalid life in boarding-house rooms .
[2]: 25 More generally, Ding Ling was passing from the milieu of a girls' schools to the male-dominated literary scene and involvement with some of China's most sophisticated male writers.
More generally, the diary displays rapid swings of mood and outlook, and captures complex ambivalence of the subject about virtually everything in her life, what one scholar called "the chaos of personality.
"savage"[2]: 54 It turns traditional morality on its head: the chasteness of her friends Yunlin and Yufang is "just one of those strange, unexplained things in life.
[2]: 53, 74 She is attracted to a man named Ling Jishi for his physical beauty, but is stimulated by the jealousy of her friend Weidi.
The author even speaks to her "readers" and admits that the diary is just one (crafted) version of her experience, and just another exercise in controlling the attention of others.
[2]: 74 The emotional complexity of the character can be sensed from the fact that, in the closing sentences of the story, her mood ranges from "profound anguish .
[5] A subtext of "Miss Sophia's Diary", left unspoken until late in the story, is that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the instinct to be attracted to someone like Ling Jishi and the fact that he is so irredeemably unenlightened.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was a major influence on Ding Ling in writing "Miss Sophia's Diary".