The woman poet...must sing, just as birds fly and rivers flow, wrote Carolina Coronado in 1846. In Spain of that time, a group of women had begun to publish poetry. Their verse--Romantic, predominantly lyric, and often linked to liberal reform--was novel and controversial, because few women had ventured into print. The poets collected in this anthology asserted in different ways their imagination and literary voice.

Susan Kirkpatrick provides an overview of the period, and Anna-Marie Aldaz adds a discussion of Spanish versification as well as biographical sketches of the twenty-one poets whose works bring alive the first decades of women's emergence as a force in the Spanish literary world.