The so-called Novelas a Marcia Leonarda published in two separate miscellanies of long poems, verse epistles and four novelas, La Filomena (1621) and La Circe (1624), have commanded relatively few — and disparate — responses from critics. This fact arises from the presentation of the textual matter to the reader and traces of self-fashioning in the form of autobiography. One such act of selfrepresentation is Lope's claim that the Novelas a Marcia Leonarda were written at the request of ‘la señora Marcia Leonarda’, whom critics have identified as Lope's lover Marta de Nevares; the mediated character of the narration carries significant implications for the role of femininity in the fictional content of the stories, discussed below.

The first novela, Las fortunas de Diana, is the only prose piece published in La Filomena, and relates the wanderings and trials of Diana, who falls in love with a young man socially inferior to her and bears his child. The second, La desdicha por la honra, is a novela morisca (Moorish romance) in the manner of El Abencerraje y la Hermosa Jarifa [Abencerraje and the Fair Jarifa]. It relates the love of a brave morisco, protected by the Viceroy of Naples, for a Sicilian Christian, his discovery that he is descended from the noble Moors (the Abencerrajes), and his escape from Italy to Constantinople in order to accomplish great feats to facilitate his ultimately unsuccessful return to his homeland, Spain. The third, La prudente venganza, echoes the theme and tight structure of a drama de honor, such as Lope's late masterpiece, El castigo sin venganza (1631). The fourth and final one, Guzmán el Bravo, is an abridged prose eulogy, the heroic account of a man of Herculean fortitude and strength, Don Felis, behind which stands the figure of Don Gaspar de Guzmán, the then favourite of Philip IV.

Critical commentary has tended to focus on three features of the texts. Earlier critics generally concentrated on the theatricality of these novellas; Georges Cirot and Walter Pabst analyzed them as comedias (plays) in prose, since Lope appears to conflate the two genres in La desdicha por la honra, stating: ‘tienen las novelas los mismos preceptos que las comedias, cuyo fin es haber dado su autor contento y gusto al pueblo’ [novellas obey the same rules as the comedia, whose purpose is for the author to give contentment and pleasure to the people].