At the height of María de Zayas's popularity in the mid-eighteenth
century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only
by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century,
Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her
gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe.
Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a
representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas's signature
topics--gender equality and domestic violence--written in an impassioned
tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This
edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English
translations, with a new introduction to Zayas's entire body of stories,
and restores Zayas's author's note and prologue, omitted from previous
English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from
notions of ideal love to love's treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and
Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern
letters.