The Daughter of the Phoenix

The novel that restores the silenced voice of Marcela de San Félix, daughter of Lope de Vega, in a vibrant portrait of Spain’s Golden Age seen from its most human, intimate, and unflinching angle. 

Madrid, August 1635. On the narrow street leading to the Convent of the Trinitarians, a crowd awaits the passage of a funeral procession. The route has been altered so that a cloistered nun may step out onto the portico to bid farewell. The deceased is none other than Lope de Vega Carpio, the Phoenix of Wits. The woman who appears behind the convent grilles is Sister Marcela de San Félix—his daughter. 

Born of the passion between Lope and the actress Micaela de Luján, Marcela grew up with her mother and her brother, Lopito, amid stages and absences. She memorized her father’s verses as recited by Micaela even before she could read, and from an early age sought the education denied to women, determined to carry on a literary legacy forbidden to any illegitimate daughter. 

This debut novel by Fernando Bonete Vizcaíno—written with exceptional command of style, historical time, and emotional depth—explores the bond between father and daughter and traces part of the lives of Lope de Vega and his daughter Marcela. To fulfill her literary vocation and become a writer, Marcela had to turn her convent cell into that “room of one’s own” that allowed her to shield herself from a resentful mother, a spurned lover, a humiliated wife, a mocked husband, an exiled nobleman, a priest in sin, and from her own illegitimacy itself.