Su Xuelin (蘇雪林, 1897－April 22, 1999）was a Chinese author and scholar. She was born in Rui'an, Zhejiang and was a descendant of Su Zhe, a renowned poet of the Song Dynasty. She studied in Anhui, and later Beijing under the supervision of Hu Shi. During the May Fourth Movement, she penned an essay Green Skies and a novel Thorny Heart which won critical acclaim. In 1922 she went to France and returned to China in 1925. She then taught in Soochow University and Wuhan University.
She was an opponent of Lu Xun, a contemporary Chinese writer, and wrote to Cai Yuanpei to dissuade him from serving as the chairman of the committee to prepare Lu's funeral after Lu died in 1936. This provoked anger from the leftists in China who vociferously castigated Su. In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party overthrew the republic, she moved to Hong Kong. Around the period she shifted her research concentration on ancient texts, such as those written by Qu Yuan and of Greek and Roman mythology.
From 1952 she taught in Taiwan, at National Taiwan Normal University and National Cheng Kung University. She retired in 1973 and was awarded the first title of Honorary Professor at Cheng Kung University. She died in Taiwan in 1999. Su was a convert to Roman Catholicism.[1]