Virginia Woolf in "A Room of Her Own" famously invented a sister named Judith Shakespeare with an appetite for learning but no opportunity to obtain it. The story does not end well. Not long after Shakespeare's death, there was a sort of real world experiment along those lines, involving a woman who had almost certainly the greatest mind in Latin America, and probably the best one in the whole of the hemisphere. Sor Juana was born in what was then a Spanish colony to an unmarried woman, but it w

Virginia Woolf in "A Room of Her Own" famously invented a sister named Judith Shakespeare with an appetite for learning but no opportunity to obtain it. The story does not end well. Not long after Shakespeare's death, there was a sort of real world experiment along those lines, involving a woman who had almost certainly the greatest mind in Latin America, and probably the best one in the whole of the hemisphere. Sor Juana was born in what was then a Spanish colony to an unmarried woman, but it was a family of means and the grandfather had books. She was precocious, adept at languages and writing, and shocked the admittedly small world of the 17th century Mexican intelligentsia by outdebating them in public as a teenager. Unlike Judith Shakespeare, Sor Juana found patrons, principally two Viceroys and their wives. But even in that milieu, a young woman was expected to be either wife or nun, and she chose the latter. No doubt because of the viceregal patronage, she was able to indulge her passion for both literature and science, not always successfully managing to contain them within the strictures of orthodox theology. Her poetry is much loved, although very ornate in the Baroque style, and some of it has clear erotic undertones. Once the sympathetic viceroys returned to Spain and an even more dour Catholicism became the rage of the colony, Sor Juana's story did not end well either. Unable to restrain her mind or pen, she was forced to confess and accept the penance of forgoing her writing, and she died tending to the sick in the convent infirmary. It is a powerful story and the subject of at least one film and several novels. Alicia Gaspar de Alba does will with the milieu in which Sor Juana lived, not just the politics of convent life but the atmosphere of the viceregal court and the countryside in which she grew up. Research frequently blunts the historical novel, but this one largely escapes that with convincing detail. Even the discussions of theology and orthodoxy are tolerable--the final one, her defeat at the hands of the Archbishop and the Inquisition, has a suitably tragic majesty. Where it fails is where one would least expect it from a novelist, especially one who disagrees with Octavio Paz' theory that Sor Juana was not an active lesbian. One would expect a modern interpretation to handle eroticism well but lose its way in the thickets of long-gone Church doctrine. There is a particularly unconvincing scene with Sor Juana and the wife of one of the Viceroys (complete with complicit Viceroy). A seventeenth century convent--even one that has now been converted into a cultural center that bears Sor Juana's name--seems like one of the most unlikeliest setting for a compelling novel, but it turns out not to be impossible.