Teresa of Ávila was born in 1515 in Gotarrendura or Ávila in Castile. She later became a Carmelite reformer, mystic, prose writer and poet. Her life unfolded in a Spain shaped by religious surveillance, imperial expansion and intense debates about interior devotion.

Teresa's writings made female spiritual experience central to Spanish literature. Her poems and autobiographical prose influenced mystical traditions by joining plain speech, visionary intensity and the authority of a woman negotiating male institutions.