Disillusioned about love, she decides that in this new gathering the audience will be mixed, but the storytellers will be only women telling tales of their disillusions with men. Lisis’s story continues in the frame of the second volume. For example, in the frame narrative of the first volume, Lisis, the main character, organizes a gathering where women and men tell 10 different stories, and she is also pursued by a suitor.
Her labyrinthine style, which includes the use of allusive language, diverse voices, and conflicting views, allowed her to follow literary and societal norms and at the same time be extremely critical of her times without fear of repercussions. Zayas’s novellas were widely read and regarded as modern day soap-operas. The “novella” (as it is known in the Italian tradition), or short novel, be it within a frame like Bocaccio’s Decameron, or without, like Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1613), was a very popular genre among Zayas’s contemporaries like Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, or Juan Pérez de Montalbán. Details from her chosen genre, subject matter, as well as from her life reveal her as a proto-feminist, and a learned woman, an engaged intellectual of her day, who paved the road for women writers as well as for women in general. She wrote a play, La traición en la amistad, around 1632 she composed poetry, some of which she included in her novels and she is best known for her two collections of short novels, each comprised of 10 novels within a narrative frame, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637), the first volume, and Desengaños amorosos (1647). María de Zayas y Sotomayor is the most popular woman writer of seventeenth-Century Spain.
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