Songbird in a gilded cage

Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz is accounted the most considerable literary figure in 17th-century Latin America. I’m happy to take this on trust, remembering with great pleasure her comedy The House of Desires, a palpable hit when given in 2004 as part of the RSC’s still memorable festival of plays from the Spanish Golden Age.

Sister Juana, born in 1651, was a favourite in the viceregal court in Mexico City. She shared the court’s delight in the cloak-and-dagger comedies of Calderón. But as a scholar and poet who expressed ‘abhorrence’ for matrimony, she had no option but to take the veil. Although this gave her the freedom to write, it didn’t allow her to leave the convent to see her play performed. In it she penned a barely disguised portrait of herself as Leonor, a girl both beautiful and clever, poor but noble, desired by many men and loved by one in particular.