Su studied in
Anhui, and later
Beijing under the supervision of
Hu Shih. 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. Then she taught at
Soochow University and
Wuhan University. Su 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, where she was offered a position as an editor and translator by the
Catholic Church in Hong Kong. However, Su was not able to find materials for her research in Hong Kong, so she left for Europe a year later, still supported by the Catholic Church. After visiting
Vatican City, she went to France. While there, she took courses at the
Collège de France, where she was influenced by
Édouard Paul Dhorme,
Paul Demiéville, and
Georges Dumézil. However, Su found that French sinology was irrelevant to her scholarship, and left France after only two years. 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 Su 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. ==Personal life==