Yenna Wu received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1986 and is currently Professor of Chinese, Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of California at Riverside. She is the author of The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Harvard University, 1995) and Chinese the Easy Way (Barron's Educational Series, 1999). She has edited Zhongguo wenxue yu funu lunji [Critical essays on Chinese literature and women] (Taipei, Taiwan, 1999), and has published over thirty articles and a number of translations and reviews. She currently serves as President of the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.

The translations read well and provide interesting, unusual, and sometimes hilarious stories from the Qing Dynasty. [Appropriate for] all collections.(Choice) Provides a rich resource for introducing a variety of fictional and dramatic works, hitherto little mentioned in Western scholarship, into the classroom.(Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association)