Sor Juana is widely considered one of the finest writers and greatest intellectuals of seventeenth-century Hispanic culture. She pursued knowledge with great fervor and evidenced such genius that, in spite of scant formal education, she had achieved renkown as a gifted writer and thinker by adolescence. Best known for her love lyrics and the long poem "El sueno," she was hailed as "the Tenth Muse of Mexico." Though she lived in a period when writing and scholarly pursuits were considered unseemly occupations for women, she was able to produce works that clearly established her as one of the best female poets, and possibly the best Hispanic poet, of the seventeenth century.

Biographical Information

Born out of wedlock to a Spanish father and Creole mother, Sor Juana was raised in the village of her birth, San Miguel de Nepantla, near Mexico Cty. Exceptionally precocious, she began to learn to...