María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–ca. 1660?) was indeed a “rare bird” in Early Modern Spain, as a successful published woman author of page-turning tales of love and death. Her tales are lengthy stories of romance, adventure, triumph, violence and loss, involving aristocratic women and their suitors, generally from the same class, although commoners and servants play important roles too. Zayas set them in the frame-tale tradition of Boccaccio's Decameron (1353) of stories told by ten young women and men, but rather than fleeing to the countryside from plague-wracked Florence like Boccaccio's storytellers, Zayas's narrators gather around braziers in an elegantly furnished room on cold December nights, to entertain the ailing frame-tale protagonist Lisis. Zayas marketed her two volumes of tales primarily to literate members of an urban lower nobility, who could also read them aloud to a wider, less lettered public. While proclaiming that all were true stories, told directly or by first-person witnesses to her narrators, she seasoned many of them with generous doses of fantasy and magic.

In the overwhelmingly masculine literary tradition of Golden Age Spain, in which women were deemed inferior creatures and enjoined to silence, she defended their worth and rights in two collections of engaging tales, published in 1637 and 1647, that were received with acclaim at the time and repeatedly republished through the eighteenth century. Each volume contains ten lengthy stories of love and death in her aristocratic class, sometimes bringing death to their servants as well. Zayas has them told by male and female narrators, gathered to entertain each other and Lisis, their ailing hostess, in her elegant salon. Lisis is the protagonist of the story that frames both collections. Male writers who were her contemporaries called her “the immortal María de Zayas” worker of “womanly wonders” with her “lively clear talent”; and “sibyl of Madrid” [la inmortal doña María de Zayas /…. / milagros de mujer / ingenio vivamente claro]. They also lauded her as “our century's Tenth Muse” [dezima Musa de nuestro siglo], the same title bestowed on the archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos and the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It was, in their praise, a backhanded compliment, one that invited seeing her and other great women writers as isolated, exceptional phenomena.