Selected Works

Overview

About two hundred and fifty pages, the principal writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, composed across the 1680s until 1691, the nun and scholar who was the leading poet of colonial Mexico. They include sonnets and other lyrics on love, jealousy, portraiture and death; the satirical poem Hombres necios, which turns on men who blame women for the faults men cause.

The collection also includes the long philosophical poem First Dream, in which the soul rises by night toward total knowledge and falls back; and the Response to Sor Filotea, her defence of a woman’s right to study, written to a bishop who had reproved her and published after her death.

What happens

Sonnets on love and death. Sor Juana’s sonnets and other lyrics address love, jealousy, portraiture and death, demonstrating her considerable range within conventional lyric subjects and forms popular throughout colonial Spanish American poetry.

Hombres necios’s satirical turn. The satirical poem Hombres necios turns specifically on men who blame women for the faults men themselves cause, exposing this gendered hypocrisy with considerable wit and rhetorical precision.

First Dream’s nighttime ascent. The long philosophical poem First Dream traces the soul’s ascent by night toward total knowledge, an ambitious meditation on the human mind’s aspiration toward complete understanding.

First Dream’s inevitable fall. The soul’s ascent in First Dream inevitably falls back, staging intellectual ambition’s genuine limits, aspiration toward complete knowledge meeting reality’s actual epistemic constraints rather than achieving triumphant transcendence.

The bishop’s reproof. A bishop, writing under the pseudonym Sor Filotea, reproves Sor Juana for her intellectual pursuits, prompting the direct personal and philosophical response that will become her most significant prose work.

The Response to Sor Filotea. Sor Juana’s Response defends a woman’s right to study, transforming personal self-justification into a genuinely consequential argument for women’s intellectual freedom, published only after her death.

How to read it

Read the satirical poem Hombres necios, turning specifically on men who blame women for the faults men themselves cause, as staking out a genuinely early and pointed feminist critique well before such arguments became common in Western literature.

Pay close attention to First Dream’s tracing of the soul’s nighttime rise toward total knowledge followed by its inevitable fall back; this stages intellectual ambition’s genuine limits with unusual sustained philosophical seriousness.

Notice how the Response to Sor Filotea, written directly to a bishop who had reproved her, transforms personal self-justification into a genuinely consequential argument for women’s intellectual freedom, its posthumous publication reflecting its controversial content.

Consider how Sor Juana’s considerable range across sonnets, satire, philosophical poetry and prose apology demonstrates genuine intellectual achievement flourishing despite the severe institutional constraints her position as a nun in colonial New Spain actually imposed.

Read these works alongside Woolf’s own Room of One’s Own to compare two writers, separated by roughly two and a half centuries, each defending women’s genuine right to intellectual space and pursuit against considerable institutional and social resistance.

Questions it raises

• Does Hombres necios’s satirical critique of men blaming women for faults men themselves cause remain persuasive across the centuries since its composition, or does its specific historical context limit how directly its argument transfers to contemporary discussions of gender and hypocrisy?
• How does First Dream’s structure, ascent toward knowledge followed by inevitable fall, shape your understanding of Sor Juana’s own view of human intellectual capacity? Does this poem ultimately celebrate or lament the mind’s aspiration toward complete understanding?
• What does the Response to Sor Filotea accomplish rhetorically by transforming personal defense into broader argument for women’s intellectual freedom? Does this strategic move from particular to general strengthen or complicate her case against the bishop’s specific reproof?
• How should a reader weigh Sor Juana’s status as a nun against her considerable intellectual and literary achievement? Does her religious position enable or constrain the specific arguments she makes about women’s right to study and create?
• Given that the Response was published only after her death, what does this delayed publication suggest about how genuinely threatening contemporaries found her arguments for women’s intellectual freedom within colonial New Spain’s specific religious and social context?
• What does this collection’s range across love poetry, satire and philosophical meditation suggest about the scope Sor Juana believed available to her as a woman writer despite her era’s considerable institutional restrictions on women’s intellectual and creative activity?