Xiahou Lingnü 夏侯令女

In Chapter 107 of the Romance, Sima Yi sends the three Cao Shuang brothers back to their residence, locks the gate with a great lock and has 800 local residents surround and guard the house. After first arresting Zhang Dang, a eunuch of the Yellow Gate, and taking his deposition, he arrests and interrogates He Yan and the others, beheads the three Cao Shuang brothers and all the implicated offenders in the marketplace, exterminates their three sets of kin, and confiscates all their family property and wealth into the treasury. Romance, Ch. 107 §21–23

At this time there is the wife of Wenshu, Cao Shuang's younger cousin: Xiahou Lingnü. Widowed early and childless, she had cut off her ears to bind herself by an oath when her father wanted to marry her off again. When Cao Shuang is executed and her father again tries to marry her off, she cuts off her nose as well. Her family, alarmed and distraught, ask why she torments herself so, when a person's life in this world is like light dust settling on a tender blade of grass, and for whom she means to keep such faith when her husband's family has all been put to death by the Sima. Romance, Ch. 107 §24

Weeping, she replies that she has heard that 'the humane do not change their integrity because of rise or decline, and the righteous do not change their hearts because of survival or ruin'; she meant to stay true to the end even when the Cao were flourishing, so how much less could she bear to abandon them now that they have been destroyed—that would be the conduct of a beast, and how could she do such a thing? Hearing this, Sima Yi deems her virtuous and permits her to adopt a son and raise him as the heir of the Cao. Romance, Ch. 107 §25

The Romance praises her by quoting a poem by a later writer that begins, 'Frail grass and fine dust—all men take the detached view, / Yet the Xiahou daughter's righteousness stood like a mountain,' saying that men fall short of the integrity of a woman in skirts and hairpins. In the Romance she appears only in these three sections of this chapter, and nothing is recorded of her afterward. Romance, Ch. 107 §24–26