Liang was born in Beijing in 1903. His father, Liang Xianxi (), was a
xiucai in the
Qing dynasty. He was educated at
Tsinghua College in Beijing from 1915 to 1923. He went on to study at
Colorado College and later pursued his graduate studies at
Harvard and
Columbia Universities. At Harvard, he studied literary criticism under
Irving Babbitt, whose
New Humanism helped shape his conservative literary tenets. After his return to China in 1926, he began a long career as a professor of English at several universities, including
Peking University,
Tsingtao University, and
Jinan University. He also served as the editor of a succession of literary supplements and periodicals, including the famous
Crescent Moon Monthly (1928–1933). During this period he published a number of literary treatises which showed the strong influence of Babbitt and demonstrated his belief that human life and human nature are the only proper subjects for literature. The best known among these are
The Romantic and the Classical,
Literature and Revolution,
The Seriousness of Literature, and
The Permanence of Literature. In each of these treatises, he upheld the intrinsic value of literature as something that transcends social class and strongly opposed using literature for propagandist purposes. These pronouncements and his dislike for the excessive influence of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other
Romanticists in China triggered a polemic war between him and
Lu Xun and drew the concerted attacks of leftist writers. His major works as a translator included
James Barrie's
Peter Pan,
George Eliot's
Silas Marner and ''Mr. Gilfil's Love Story'', and
Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights. In 1949, to escape the civil war, Liang
fled to Taiwan where he taught at
Taiwan Normal University until his retirement in 1966. During this period, he established himself as a lexicographer by bringing out a series of English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries. His translation works included
George Orwell's
Animal Farm and
Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations. Liang is now remembered chiefly as the first Chinese scholar to single-handedly translate the complete works of
Shakespeare into Chinese. This project, which was first conceived in 1930, was completed in 1967. He then embarked on another monumental project – that of writing a comprehensive history of English literature in Chinese, which was completed in 1979 and consists of a three-volume history and a companion set of
Selected Readings in English Literature in Chinese translation, also in three volumes. Liang's literary fame rests, first and foremost, on the hundreds of short essays on familiar topics, especially those written over a span of more than four decades (1940–1986) and collected under the general title of
Yashe Xiaopin, now available in English translation under the title
From a Cottager’s Sketchbook. ==Bibliography==