In this defensive manner, María de Zayas y Sotomayor first addresses the readership of her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) in the ‘Al que leyere’ prologue. Through her confident defence of female intelligence, she strips her captatio benevolentiae of even the barest veil of humility. By contrast, Mariana de Carvajal, one of her successors in the Spanish novella genre, would later adopt a more bashful stance, seeking allowances to be made for ‘los defectos de una tan mal cortada pluma’ and referring to her Navidades de Madrid (1663) as ‘aborto inútil de mi ingenio’. Zayas’s audacity is all the more striking when one takes into account the context of her literary enterprise; her introductory discourse is that of a ‘Defensa de las mujeres’, pre-dating Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo’s 1726 essay by almost ninety years.

We possess very little information regarding the life of María de Zayas, most of which derives from the findings of Manuel Serrano y Sanz. Documentation suggests that she was probably baptised in the Madrid parish of San Sebastián on September 12th 1590. She was the daughter of Fernando de Zayas y Sotomayor, an infantry captain who was granted a knighthood in the prestigious military Order of Santiago, and of Doña María de Barasa. Apparently, she resided for most of her life in Madrid. Don Fernando served the seventh Count of Lemos during the period when the latter acted as Viceroy of Naples (1610–16). It is uncertain whether or not the Zayas family accompanied Don Fernando at this time; had the author experienced an Italian sojourn, it is conceivable that this could have exposed her to their popular novella genre, inspiring her creative interest.