What do you find especially fascinating about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz?
Well, as you can probably guess, quite a lot. There is the beauty, history and legend of the mountains of her childhood; and springing from this, the pattern of a poet’s withdrawal from the world – from this childhood Eden to a palace, from palace to convent, from poetry to silence. There is also the wild power of her intelligence and the freakishness this conferred upon her – doubly, triply so – as a beautiful woman and a product of this strange new American continent. And there is her loneliness, and traces of feelings of failure in the midst of the most spectacular accomplishment. The novel takes its inspiration from the Baroque – what makes it such a dramatic artistic period is its concern with the audience’s perspective. We see it, for example, in some of the great masterpieces of paintings of Caravaggio and Velásquez. So what I found especially fascinating was to take up the story of this pre-Enlightenment figure who was inclined to pursue her hunger for a knowledge without limit
