Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (840–868) is one of the most famous female poets in premodern Chinese literature. Raised in the Tang capital of Chang’an, at sixteen she became the concubine, or secondary wife, of a recent imperial examination graduate, but when they separated after three years she entered a Daoist nunnery. At the age of twenty-eight she was executed on dubious charges of having strangled her maid to death.
Bio by Lucas Klein