Chiung Yao, a romance writer who published some of the best-selling novels in the Chinese-speaking world and helped shape the idea of romantic love there for generations, died on Wednesday at her home in New Taipei City, Taiwan. She was 86.

言情小说作家琼瑶上周三在台湾新北市的家中去世，享年86岁。她曾出版过多部华语世界最畅销的小说，并帮助塑造了几代人的浪漫爱情观。

Her son, Chen Weizhong, and her daughter-in-law, Jessie Ho, announced on her Facebook page that her death was a suicide. She had been advocating for the right to a dignified death.

她的儿子陈中维和儿媳何琇琼在琼瑶的Facebook页面上宣布她的死亡系自杀。琼瑶一直在倡导有尊严的死亡权。

“Death is a journey everyone must take,” she wrote in a Facebook post on the day she died. “I don’t want to leave it to fate or wither away slowly. I want to take control of this final chapter.”

“死亡是每个人必经之路，”她在去世当天的Facebook帖文中写道。“我不想听天由命，不想慢慢枯萎凋零，我想为这最后的大事‘作主’。”

Chiung Yao’s first book, “Outside the Window,” the semi-autobiographical story of a doomed love affair between a high school student and her Chinese literature teacher, was published in 1963 and achieved great success. She went on to publish more than 60 novels and short-story collections. Many of her works were adapted into films and television series.

琼瑶的首部作品《窗外》于1963年出版，是一部半自传小说，讲述了一名高中生与她的国文老师之间注定失败的爱情故事，作品获得了巨大成功。她后来出版了60多部小说和短篇小说集。她的许多作品被改编成电影和电视剧。

In Chiung Yao’s novels, love transcends everything else. It’s worth giving up one’s family, career, social status, even — literally — one’s limbs. “You only lost one of your legs,” a character in her 1973 novel “Fantasies Behind the Pearly Curtain” famously says. “What she lost was her love.”

在琼瑶的小说中，爱情超越一切，为了爱情，放弃家庭、事业、社会地位，甚至——毫不夸张地说——放弃肢体，都是值得的。“你只不过是失了一条腿，”她的1973年小说《一帘幽梦》中的人物说了这样一句名言。“她为你割舍掉爱情。”

Her plots are often dramatic and intricate, filled with twists and turns of love in all its shades: bittersweet, unrequited, obsessive, resentful and tragic. Among the titles of her novels are “The Heart Has a Million Knots” (1972) and “Several Degrees of Sunset Red” (1964).

她的故事情节往往跌宕起伏而又复杂，充满各种曲折的爱情：悲喜交集、单恋，痴情，怨恨和悲剧。她的小说包括《心有千千结》（1972年）和《几度夕阳红》（1964年）。

She was also known for mixing her love stories with elements of ancient Chinese literature. “We would love to think that we all learned our poetry from school, from our elders. But in truth, a lot of us learned them from Chiung Yao,” Eileen Chow, a Sinologist at Duke University who grew up in Taiwan, said in an interview. “I feel like I’m a poetry professor in some ways because of her.”

她还以将爱情故事与中国古代文学元素相结合而闻名。“我们乐于认为我们的诗词是从学校和长辈那里学来得。事实上，我们很多人都是从琼瑶那里学来的，”在台湾长大的杜克大学汉学家周成荫在接受采访时说。“我觉得，某种程度上说，我是因为她才成为诗词教授。”

Her style was so distinct that people’s overly sentimental remarks could draw comments like “You’re so Chiung Yao!” On both sides of the Taiwan Strait, many women bear “Chiung Yao names,” given names that are similar to those of her female characters and usually have Chinese characters such as “dream,” “rain” and “cloud.”

她的风格非常独特，以至于过分多愁善感的言论可能会被评论“你太琼瑶了！”在台湾海峡两岸，许多女性都有“琼瑶式的名字”，它们与她笔下女性角色的名字相似，通常包含“梦”“雨”“云”等字。

She often wrote of young people rebelling against their families and social norms. That’s one reason her novels were popular in Taiwan before the nationalist government lifted martial law in 1987, and in mainland China in 1980s and the ’90s after the country emerged from the Cultural Revolution.

她经常描写年轻人反抗家庭和社会规范的故事。正因如此，她的小说在1987年国民党政府解除戒严令之前的台湾广受欢迎，又在文革结束后上世纪八九十年代的中国大陆流行。

In the 1980s, she started addressing social issues in novels like “Paradise on Fire” (1984), the story of an orphaned young girl who is abused and sexually assaulted by her stepfather. But those novels received little attention. She later focused more on film and TV production.

在20世纪80年代，她开始在小说中讨论社会问题，如《失火的天堂》（1984年）讲述了一个被继父虐待并性侵的孤女的故事。但这些小说很少受到关注。后来，她将更多的精力放在了电影和电视制作上。

“While Chiung Yao was criticized by intellectuals for her dreamy, romanticized novels as being divorced from reality, her attempts to tackle domestic violence and sexual assault were met with indifference from a society unprepared to confront such heavy topics,” Fang-mei Lin, a literature professor at National Taiwan Normal University who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Chiung Yao’s novels, posted on Facebook. “As a result, these works were largely overlooked.”

“琼瑶写梦幻的爱情小说，被知识分子批评为违背现实。当她处理家暴与性侵，又因社会尚未准备好面对这么沉重的议题，使得此书未获重视，”国立台湾师范大学文学教授林芳玫在Facebook上写道。她的博士论文是关于琼瑶小说的。

Many of the films and TV series adapted from Chiung Yao’s work were blockbusters and gave early exposure to celebrated actors in both China and Taiwan, including Brigitte Lin, Zhao Wei and Fan Bingbing. She was the producer and screenwriter of many of them.

由琼瑶作品改编的许多电影和电视剧都轰动一时，并让林青霞、赵薇和范冰冰等中国和台湾的著名演员有了早期的曝光机会。她是其中许多电影和电视剧的制片人和编剧。

Chiung Yao was one of the first Taiwanese producers to tap into China’s massive film and TV market. “My Fair Princess,” a 1998 romantic comedy TV series that she wrote and produced, became the most viewed series in China. It was rerun many times in the next 20 years and still topped the ratings in 2018. The series, the story of two couples set in the imperial Qing court, has been compared to the popular American sitcom “Friends.”

琼瑶是最早进入中国庞大影视市场的台湾制片人之一。1998年，由她编剧并担任制片人的浪漫电视喜剧《还珠格格》成为中国收视率最高的电视剧。在接下来的20年里，该剧多次重播，到2018年仍高居收视率榜首。《还珠格格》讲述了两对情侣在清朝宫廷里的故事，有人将其与美国热门情景喜剧《老友记》相提并论。

Chiung Yao was born Chen Che in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, on April 20, 1938, months after Japan invaded China. Her family fled to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Her father, Chen Zhiping, taught Chinese literature at universities, and her mother, Yuan Xinru, taught the same subject at a middle school. Her pen name, meaning beautiful jade, came from an ancient Chinese poem.

琼瑶原名陈喆，于1938年4月20日——日本入侵中国数月后——出生于四川省成都市。1949年中国内战结束时，她随家人逃到台湾。她的父亲陈致平在大学教授中国文学，母亲袁行恕亦在中学教授中国文学。“琼瑶”这个笔名的意思是美玉，来自一首中国古诗。

At 18, while in high school, Chiung Yao fell in love with her Chinese literature teacher, who was 25 years her senior. Her parents forced her to end it. To their further disappointment, she failed her college entrance examination, which seemingly doomed her future.

18岁时，还在上高中的琼瑶爱上了比她大25岁的国文老师。父母强迫她结束这段感情。更令他们失望的是，她没能考上大学，这让她的前途一片黯淡。

When she was 20, she married Ma Senqing, a fellow aspiring writer. They had a son two years later.

20岁时，她嫁给了同样有志于成为作家的马森庆。两年后，他们有了一个儿子。

When her son was 19 months old, she sent him to a nursery so she could write in the morning, according to her memoir, “My Stories,” first published in 1989. After publishing a few novels, she was able to afford a refrigerator so she would need to buy groceries only once a week, giving her more time for writing.

根据她1989年首次出版的回忆录《我的故事》，儿子19个月大的时候，她把他送到托儿所，这样她就可以在早上写作。出版了几部小说后，她可以买得起冰箱了，这样她每周只需要买一次菜，就有了更多时间来写作。

As her writing career was taking off, her marriage was falling apart. According to her memoir, her husband was jealous of her success. They divorced when she was 26.

当她的写作事业蒸蒸日上时，她的婚姻破裂了。根据她的回忆录，丈夫嫉妒她的成功。在她26岁那年，两人离婚了。

She then became entangled in an affair with her editor and publisher, Ping Hsin-tao, who was married and had three children. Feeling immense guilt, she wrote in her memoir, she tried to break it off many times, but he insisted. After acrimonious divorce proceedings that lasted eight years, he married her in 1979.

之后，她与她的编辑兼出版人平鑫涛发生了婚外情。已婚的平鑫涛有三个孩子。她在回忆录中写道，她感到无比内疚，多次试图分手，但他坚持不同意。经过长达八年的激烈离婚诉讼之后，他于1979年与她结婚。

She wrote in her memoir that many of her readers asked whether the love she wrote about existed in real life, adding, “Aren’t those earth-shattering romances just your fabrications?”

她在回忆录中写道，许多读者问她所写的爱情在现实生活中是否存在，还会问，“那些惊天动地的爱，不是你的杜撰吗？”

“Everyone has their own life experiences,” she said. “What puzzles me is why the love in my life comes so intensely, so powerfully and so dramatically.”

“每个人有每个人自己的人生，”她写道。“我只是很奇怪，为什么我生命里的爱，会来得如此强烈？如此震撼？而且如此戏剧化？”

Ms. Lin, the literature professor, wrote: “Writing about love was Qiong Yao’s career. But believing in love was her lifelong mission.”

文学教授林芳玫写道：“书写爱情是琼瑶的事业。信仰爱情则是她的志业。”

Chiung Yao and Mr. Ping remained married until he died at 92 in 2019. In addition to her son, she is survived by granddaughters.

两人的婚姻一直持续到平鑫涛于2019年92岁去世。除了儿子，她的遗属还包括几个孙女。

While Mr. Ping lay unconscious in bed after having a stroke, Chiung Yao and his children had a falling-out over whether to keep him on life support. In a Facebook post a week before her death, Chiung Yao wrote, “The final stretch of life should not be filled with such helplessness and misery!”

当平鑫涛中风卧床失去知觉时，琼瑶和他的孩子们就是否继续给他使用生命维持系统发生了争吵。去世前一周，琼瑶在Facebook上写道：“生命的最后一里路，不应该是这样‘无助、凄惨’的！”

In the post, she reflected on her life with Mr. Ping: “I honestly admit, ‘How deeply, deeply I miss you!’ The good you, and the bad you!”

在帖子中，她回顾了自己和平鑫涛的生活：“很坦白的承认：‘我多么多么的想你！’好的你，坏的你！”

“You have already departed,” she wrote, “Perhaps I should follow.”

“你，已然归去，”她写道，“我，不如归去。”

A week later, in a Facebook post, she referred to herself as a spark and said that she had done her best to burn brightly. “Now, as the flame is about to fade,” she wrote, “I choose to depart gracefully in this way.”

一周后，她在Facebook上发帖，说自己是火花，已经尽力燃烧过。“如今，当火焰将熄之前，”她写道，“我选择这种方式，翩然归去。”