Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, original name Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun, an outstanding writer of the Latin American colonial period and of the Hispanic Baroque.
Background
Juana Inés de la Cruz was born in San Miguel Nepantla in the Amecameca territory near the City of Mexico, Mexico on November 12, 1651. She was christened Juana InésInes de Asbaje and received her religious name when she entered a nunnery at the age of 17.
Education
She learned to read on her own initiative at the age of three; she composed her first serious verses at the age of eight; and afterward, she urged her family to allow her to study at the university disguised as a man.
Career
Sor Juana became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court, and her intelligence and beauty brought her great renown in the capital. Although it has often been supposed that Sor Juana became a nun because of an unfortunate love affair, which is supposedly revealed in the passionate and seemingly sincere amorous poetry written by her in this period, her own explanation was that the convent offered the only possible life for a woman in those times who desired to be free to study. By this interpretation, her action was the escape of an intellectual woman from the intricate obligations of a colonial society; and in any case it is certain that until the last two years of her life she spent her monastic life absorbed in her books and scientific instruments and dedicated almost completely to religious contemplation and asceticism. Sor Juana's poetry reveals her as more than an intellectual prodigy. She surpasses the traditional rhetoric of colonial culteranismo, and seems to be aware of being intellectually strange to the world, and out of that awareness there developed a poetic consciousness of self. Sor Juana, the "tenth muse, " as she was called in the title of the first published volume of her verse (Madrid, 1689), was the first genuine poet to find expression in the Americas. Aside from her love of lyrics she wrote at least two long allegorical poems and a number of dramas of both profane and religious inspiration. Sor Juana died on April 17, 1695.