? – 1717. A woman of letters and a poet, second wife of Đinh Nho Hoàn. When her husband died on the road to China, she took her own life to follow him. The Lê court proclaimed her Tiết phụ — the lady of fidelity — and had built for her the temple where the four deities are venerated. Six of the conference's thirty-one papers are devoted to her.
Ⅰ
A debt that became a marriage
She came from the village of Do Lễ, Hưng Nguyên district, Nghệ An province. Her father, a registry keeper named Phan, had been imprisoned, then found innocent and freed by Đinh Nho Công, at the time a censor on a tour of inspection. He died soon after, holding the hand of his five-year-old daughter and lamenting that he had never been able to repay the debt.
Her mother took her to Thăng Long, where they kept a shop near the South Gate. The girl was fifteen, and suitors were not lacking. One day Đinh Nho Hoàn, by then a mandarin, stopped at the shop: the mother recognised in him the son of the man who had saved her husband, and offered him her daughter.
She entered the household at sixteen, as second wife. The sources agree on her gifts: accomplished in every womanly virtue, learned in letters, skilled in poetry — not only a good wife, writes the Hà Tĩnh museum, but “a companion in literature” to her husband.
Ⅱ
The farewell at Lã Côi
In the year Ất Mùi (1715), when her husband left on embassy, she accompanied him as far as Lã Côi — today in Gia Lâm district, Hanoi. The Hà Tĩnh museum reports her words: she told him it was a fine thing that a man who cannot command armies should settle the kingdom's affairs by his speech, and begged him to keep an upright heart after the good ambassadors of old — “and not to trouble himself over his wife”.
She composed ten poems of farewell; only three have come down to us. In the second she sets aside the easy image of the marvellous encounter and opposes to it the true difficulty, that of the ambassador who succeeds:
“To meet a daughter of heaven is easy; to equal Tô Vũ or Phó Bật in embassy is hard. Let my lord not linger over me, who am a young wife: let him bring home instead the two characters of loyalty.”
Before they parted, he left her the tunic he was wearing.
Ⅲ
The fidelity, and the title
When the coffin had been brought home and the funeral completed, she hanged herself to follow her husband. She left a funeral oration, a poem of farewell to her mother and a poem to the first wife, Lady Lê. From her lament the Hà Tĩnh museum quotes these lines, firm and without complaint:
“To die for the kingdom's affair fulfils a man's wish. To die or to live is one and the same — what use is lamenting? The dead do not return: what good are tears?”
The matter was carried to the court. The Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục records it in the year Đinh Dậu, the thirteenth of the Vĩnh Thịnh era (1717): the king praised her fidelity, granted her twenty mẫu of cult ricefields, conferred the title á thận phu nhân, ordered a temple raised and gave her a gilded board of honour bearing the two characters “Tiết phụ”.
On her age at death the sources differ: about twenty-one according to the Hà Tĩnh museum, nineteen according to Đinh Tú Anh (2023).
She is venerated at đền Gôi Vị, the temple the court had built for her and which still bears her popular name — đền Bà Tiết. The board with the three characters “Tiết Phụ Môn” is kept in the clan's ancestral house at Gôi Mỹ. Her life fed literature: the site recalls that the poet Đoàn Thị Điểm drew on it for the “An Ấp liệt nữ”, and one conference paper follows that passage “from model to literary character”.