Calle de María Zayas

She wrote of forbidden passions when almost no woman signed her own name. María Zayas recalls María de Zayas y Sotomayor, born in Madrid in 1590. Her fame came with the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares, published in Zaragoza because the Junta de Reformación had cut off her printing license in Castile. Later she published the Desengaños amorosos, tales of cruelty and revenge that critics read as a forerunner of horror fiction in Spanish. She argued that souls have no sex and claimed for women the education denied them. She died in 1653, in poverty, and in the eighteenth century the Inquisition banned the reprinting of her work.