Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Juana Inés de la Cruz was born about 1648 in a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish officer and a criolla mother. At three she secretly followed her sister to school and learned to read and write; at seven, hearing that there was a university in Mexico City, she begged her mother to let her go there dressed as a boy, and when this was refused she taught herself in her grandfather's library, learning Latin in twenty lessons. As a girl she was taken into the viceregal court as lady-in-waiting to the vicereine; the viceroy once assembled forty scholars to examine her in public, and her answers astonished them all. To be free to read and write, she entered a convent at about twenty; in her cell she gathered thousands of books and many scientific instruments and wrote a great body of poems, plays and essays, earning the name 'the Tenth Muse'. In her last years, under pressure from church authorities, she sold all her books, and she died of an illness caught while nursing victims of an epidemic.