María de Zayas y Sotomayor was a “rare bird” in Early Modern Spain, a successful published woman author of page-turning tales of love and death. In the overwhelmingly masculine literary tradition of Golden Age Spain, in which women were deemed inferior creatures and enjoined to silence, she defended their worth and rights in two collections of engaging tales that were repeatedly republished through the eighteenth century. Today her stories are drawing – and amazing – a new public. Witness the reaction of one astonished twentieth-century reader I found penciled in the margin of a library copy: “Zayas is a trip!”

That reader's reaction echoed my own when I first read a Zayas story in about 1981. When I was a graduate student in Hispanic literature in the 1970s and 1980s, the only women writers from the early periods on my required reading list were two nuns: Santa Teresa and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; I came to admire Santa Teresa and love Sor Juana. When I was finishing my dissertation on another topic, I happened to audit a course by a new professor who had us read a Zayas story. I don't remember which story we read, but I do remember being blown away by its difference and its daring. After a decade of writing on Early Modern Spanish drama, that singular woman's voice drew me to teaching and studying María de Zayas. She herself greets readers with the words that stand as my epigraph.

My purpose is to introduce this icon of the Hispanic world to new Zayas readers, giving a sense of the context in which María de Zayas wrote and how she sought to use her stories to change it for the better for both women and men, entertaining them as she did so. After the first two chapters, readers may want to pick and choose according to their own interests. The first chapter, “Zayas and Her World,” sets out what we know of her life and publications and gives a sketch of her sociopolitical context in seventeenth-century Spain. In chapter 2, “Exemplary Tales of Love: A Contradiction,” I introduce readers to her tales of love in her first volume, analyzing her paradoxical use of sexual desire to drive her plots while warning of its dangers.