"Hồ Xuân Hương is an improbable figure in Vietnamese literature. Vietnamese historians are virtually unanimous in acclaiming her as the "most special" poetry writer who ever lived in Vietnam. ... She wrote poetry which, for all its playfulness, may have been the darkest assault upon Confucian ethics ever delivered by a literate scholar of a classical East Asian society. Most modern Vietnamese writers agree that she often went too far, to the point where her contemporaries regarded her as a "monster," whose influence should be obliterated."