Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a Mexican prodigy who read at three, asked to be sent to the university disguised as a boy, served at the viceroy’s court, and at nineteen entered a convent because, she said, it was the least unsuitable way to live for one who wished to study. She wrote plays, love poems, philosophical verse and the First Dream, and in the Reply to Sor Filotea defended a woman’s right to learning against the bishop who had rebuked her. Pressed by her confessor, she sold her library of four thousand books and died nursing her sisters in a plague. She is the first great poet of the Americas.