The presence of his personal life in Lope de Vega's literary output, noticed by his contemporaries and studied exhaustively by scholars in modern times, acquires a particular intensity in the case of his youthful love for Elena Osorio. The couple’s relationship probably began around 1583 and ended abruptly in early 1588 when Lope was exiled to Valencia as a result of the satires he penned against Elena and her family. The motive for the attacks is to be discovered in the appearance of a rich, new suitor, Francisco Perrenot de Granvela, who was of a higher social standing than Lope and was favoured by Elena and her family, to his detriment. The conversion of these episodes into literature began immediately, taking the form of morisco and pastoral ballads which were very widely circulated at the time and collected in later years in a number of anthologies; they were subsequently inspirational in the creation of individual scenes and even the entire plots of plays (for example, Belardo el furioso), as well as the composition of short stories (La prudente venganza), passages of epic works (such as canto XIX of La hermosura de Angélica) and lyric poems (such as the mayoral [farm steward] cycle of sonnets). The conception of a project such as La Dorotea (1632), a lengthy prose dialogue written when Lope was approaching 70 and presented as the ‘history’ of these events, clearly indicates the exceptional place that this experience had in the writer's memory.

A short summary of the plot will reveal the importance of its autobiographical component to the work. Dorotea and the young poet Don Fernando have been lovers for five years. Gerarda, an old go-between who is a friend of Dorotea’s mother, Teodora, persuades her to break off this liaison and look kindly upon the suit of Don Bela, a rich indiano (returnee from the New World), who has fallen for the young woman. Dorotea at first refuses but in the end explains to Don Fernando that she has no choice in the matter. He feels betrayed, and after an argument with her, makes up his mind to flee in desperation to Seville, taking his servant Julio, and not without first having managed to obtain jewels from Marfisa, a former lover, with the story that he has to leave town as a result of a murder he has committed.