When I started working on my first book on María de Zayas in the 1990s, some colleagues warned me, “Everybody's working on María de Zayas.” The subtext was that if there were already a couple of books on this supposedly little-known Spanish woman writer in the age of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Góngora and kindred much-studied male writers, no more were needed. What more of interest could be found in her work?

The skeptical colleagues were right about blossoming interest in Zayas, but they were wrong about what we found to engage us in her novellas of desire, death and disillusion. Years later, as I wrote conclusions to that book, I imagined a different comment from skeptics: “You’re actually finishing this book on María de Zayas? Amazing!” Among fans and students of Zayas, I was not alone in finding so much to say and to puzzle over in her works that it was hard for us to write finis to our studies. With so much now written about her and more surely in process, however, I will here conclude by summarizing what has and has not been added to our knowledge of Zayas in the last few decades, as well as giving the highlights of her reception over the centuries since she first published.

Work on Zayas over the last quarter century has peeled away much of the earlier tendency to fill in the holes in her biography by reading the lives of her heroines as autobiography. Readers are no longer led to believe that a disappointment in love made her retreat to a convent, as did many of her protagonists, nor that she became a nun, as far as we know. Although convent life did afford women like Santa Teresa and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz the space and even the obligation to write, Zayas's path to literary creativity was nourished by membership in an urban lower-middle aristocracy, as the daughter of María de Carasa, whose family was involved in the literary arts and publishing, and Fernando de Zayas, an infantry captain and member of the elite military-religious Order of Santiago. She lived primarily in Madrid from her birth in 1590 until at least 1647; recent research has shown that she had a younger sister, Isabel, and a third sister of unknown age.