Place in the history of the Chinese novel

The outline of the plot seems to borrow from Haoqiu zhuan, a 17th-century Scholar-Beauty romance in which a well-educated young lady acts independently but within the confines of propriety. The novel brings together two separate genres, chivalric fiction and Scholar-Beauty Romance, among the first to do so. The critic Lee Haiyan remarks that the novel is also "highly original in its efforts to incorporate the moral and aesthetic insights of the cult of qing into orthodox Confucianism," that is, the cult of "feeling."

The scholar Maram Epstein finds the novel "remarkable" for its "depiction of elite women who assume the roles of scholars, statesmen, and knights-errant." In contrast to Dream of the Red Chamber, where the women were "ten times" better than the men but were confined to the domestic sphere, the women in this novel displace men in their traditionally male roles, even in the Confucian roles of social engagement.

It opens with this observation:

Most people nowadays regard ernü and yingxiong as two different kinds of people... They mistakenly think that those who indulge in force and like fighting are "yiongxiong", while those who toy with rouge and powder or have a weakness for catamites are "ernű" ... What they don't realize is that only when one has the pure nature of a hero can one fully possess a loving heart, and only when one is a truly filial child can one perform heroic deeds....

Lee contrasts this with the homosocial world of chivalric fiction of earlier times, which displayed a hostile attitude toward women and their corrupting influence.

The novel was adapted a number of times into films and television.

References and further reading

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• , esp Ch. 6"Masterful Women and Deficient Men in Jinghua yuan and Ernü Yingxiong zhuan.

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• , esp. "Ernü Yingxiong As Confucian Romantic," pp. 51–58.