Sor Juana Inés de la Cruzthe AuroraINFP

In the last days of November 1690, the bishop of Puebla printed a private critique by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and attached a scolding letter of his own. She was about 42, a nun of the convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, and the most celebrated writer in New Spain.

He signed his letter “Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” a nun who did not exist. Behind the mask he praised her mind warmly, then came to his point. It was a pity, he wrote, that so great an understanding should stoop to the petty news of the earth and not look into what happens in Heaven.

When the printed pages reached her, she broke into what she called “tears of confusion,” adding that crying did not come easily to her. Then she said nothing for three months.

Auroras rarely answer a blow in the hour it lands. They go quiet, and from outside the quiet looks like defeat. Inside, the reply is being built, sentence by sentence, until it can be said whole.

On 1 March 1691 she sent it: the Respuesta a Sor Filotea, the reply to Sister Filotea. She played along with the bishop's costume from the first line, addressing a “very illustrious lady,” and in her opening sentence she named the “just fear” that had kept her silent so long.

Then she told him the story of her own mind. She had learned to read before she was three. As a girl she set herself lessons, and if she failed to learn one in time she cut off some of her hair, since a head so bare of knowledge had no right to be dressed in hair. She gave up cheese because she had heard it made people slow.

Of all the lives open to a woman like her, she explained, the convent had been the least unsuitable, so in 1669 she took her vows. She had hoped, in part, to quiet the hunger to know. It came with her.

Once, she told him, a prioress who thought study was a matter for the Inquisition ordered her to stop. She obeyed, and put down her books. Her mind kept going. She went on studying everything God had made, with “this whole universal machine” as her book.

In form the Respuesta is humble from start to finish. In substance it defends her right, and every woman's right, to think. It is the Aurora gift at its most refined: everything said once, completely, in a shape that was very hard to punish.

No reply from the bishop is known. In her last years she gave up her library and her instruments, and whether she did so freely or under pressure, no one can now say. In 1695 an epidemic swept the convent. She nursed her sisters, caught it, and died on 17 April, at 46.

Five years later the Respuesta was printed in Madrid. She had tried to leave herself at the convent door, and failed, and the self she brought in with her is the one still being read.