sor juana is on the shattered-mirror shelf because her identity was not lost — it was taken, piece by piece, by people with power over her — and because what she wrote while defending it is still one of the clearest accounts anywhere of what a self is actually made of: a room, a discipline, and time to think.
the mind arrived early and unwanted. born juana ramírez de asbaje near mexico city — in 1648 or 1651; the records disagree — she taught herself to read at about three by following her sister to lessons, read her grandfather's library in secret, and later wrote that as a girl she begged to be dressed as a boy so she could attend university in the capital. refused, she kept studying anyway — at one point giving up cheese, she wrote, because she'd heard it dulled the mind, and study she could not give up. at the viceregal court, where she served the vicereine as a lady of honor, the story goes that a panel of some forty scholars was assembled to test the teenager — and she held her own against all of them. the story comes from her era's admirers; what's certain is that a mind like hers had exactly two respectable containers in 1660s new spain: marriage, or the convent.
she chose the convent, and said why with unusual frankness: not primarily a religious calling, but because a nun's cell — unlike a wife's household — came with a room of her own and time to think. after a false start with the too-severe carmelites in 1667, she entered the hieronymite convent of san jerónimo in 1669, around eighteen. and for over twenty years it worked. inside her cell she assembled one of the largest private libraries in the americas — the commonly cited figure is around 4,000 books, an estimate rather than an inventory — plus scientific and musical instruments and maps. she wrote love poems, plays, philosophical verse; she became, while a professed nun, the most celebrated writer in new spain.
the dismantling began in 1690, with a betrayal dressed as a compliment. a private letter she'd written criticizing a famous jesuit's sermon was published without her permission — apparently by the bishop of puebla, who attached his own letter under a woman's pen name — 'sor filotea' — praising her gifts and advising her to abandon secular study for properly devotional concerns. her answer, the respuesta a sor filotea (1691), ran to roughly six times the bishop's length: her life story, the boy's clothes, the cheese, and a defense of women's right to learn built on learned women from scripture onward — with the kitchen itself entered into evidence: 'if aristotle had cooked,' as her line is commonly rendered in english translation, 'he would have written a great deal more.'
it is one of the earliest sustained defenses of a woman's intellectual life written in the americas. it did not save hers. under pressure from her confessor and superiors — how freely she acted is still debated by scholars, and both readings are noted here — she sold the library and the instruments around 1693–94, the proceeds reportedly to the poor, and signed documents of penitence. one, on february 8, 1694, the silver anniversary of her vows, she signed in her own blood with the era's formula of self-abasement: 'yo, la peor de todas' — i, the worst of all women. a year later an epidemic swept the convent. she nursed her sisters through it, caught it, and died on april 17, 1695 — in the room she had entered twenty-six years earlier in search of time to think.