In an oft-quoted remark, Adrienne Rich wrote that, ‘before sisterhood, there was the knowledge – transitory, fragmented, perhaps, but original and crucial – of mother-and-daughterhood’. Having discussed the dialectics of women’s sisterhood, betrayals, and service in María de Zayas’s prose, attention is here turned to this other axial female relationship: the intergenerational mother– daughter bond. In Coppélia Kahn’s terms, I trace the ‘maternal subtext’ of Zayas’s tales, with specific reference to El prevenido engañado, El imposible vencido, and El jardín engañoso, from the Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. In these novellas, family separation and restrictive, external circumstances hamper mothers’ efficacy to varying degrees. Mothers are largely absent from the bleak narrative landscape of Zayas’s later work, the Desengaños amorosos; when mothers’ presence is felt, such as in Amar sólo por vencer, their agency is again ineffectual and ephemeral. Lastly, I examine Zayas’s overarching frame narrative in relation to this theme; motherhood is integral to its resolution, insofar as mothers play a prominent role during the two saraos held in Lisis’s home and, most particularly, at their close. Unlike secular ruptures in the familial structure of the novellas, Zayas portrays the monastic denouement as fostering and enshrining the bonds of motherhood in her frame narrative.

Contemporary feminist theorists have placed the uncharted territory of mother–daughter relations at the forefront of their works. For example, Rich describes mother–daughter relations as ‘the great unwritten story’, and, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf places special emphasis on the necessity for female authors to ‘think back through our mothers’. Responding to Rich’s charge, Marianne Hirsch proclaims that ‘the story of mother and daughter has indeed been written, although it is not often found on the surface but in the submerged depths of literary texts’, particularly in works written by women.