Soror Maria do Céu (1658–1753) was born in Lisbon, Portugal. At about age fifteen, she felt drawn to religious life and entered the cloistered Franciscan Convento de Nossa Senhora da Esperança for the daughters of noble families in Lisbon, where she lived for nearly eighty years. In her convent, she served as portress, mistress of novices, and twice as abbess, and she wrote literary texts in Portuguese and Spanish. During her later years, nine volumes of her lyric and narrative poetry, plays, allegories, fables, aphorisms, biographies, saints’ lives, short stories, microstories, and apologues were published.