The life of St. Teresa is like a score written in different measures and tonalities, with a sharp crescendo in the last years of her life, when she writes and at the same time founds, on the back of mules and carts, at a time when the disease and the oppositions she had to face did not cease. With a determined character and plenty of common sense, she overcame everything, thanks to her attractiveness staff and her growth in the face of adversity, behaving as a brave woman, leader, passionate and seductive. She was always in search of God and in her personality, apparently opposite archetypes emerge: mysticism-internship, word-work, silence-action and adventure-recognition.

In his training had much to do with reading, to which he was able to approach from his early years, in his father's house. To his natural intelligence, his love for the truth, - "the truth suffers but does not perish" he wrote-, and his behavior as a free man, we must add how much he was able to learn and reflect on books. In everything related to prayer, which he defined as attention of friendship with God, he was also influenced by his readings, especially the Spiritual Abecedary of Francisco de Osuna, from which he drank in difficult moments of his journey. About this last book, in particular, he wrote: "I took great pleasure in it.... Having that book as my master .... it seems that the Lord put it in my hands". Ultimately, Teresa understood the graces received in prayer as aimed at giving strength for the service to others, affirming on this last point: "Does perfect love have this strength: that we forget our own contentment to please those we love?

St. Teresa proclaimed herself a friend of the letters (knowledge), because they taught her and gave her light, being of the opinion that every Christian should "deal with whoever has letters, if he can, and the more the better, and those who go on the path of prayer have more need of this, and the more spiritual, the more". Likewise, he affirmed that, when he lacked a book, his soul was in disarray and his thoughts were lost. 

In the Constitutions that she left written for her nuns she prescribed in detail the necessity of a small Library Services in the convent: "Let the prioress take care that there are good books, especially: Carthusians, Flos Sanctorum, Contemptus mundi, chapel of religious, those of Fray Luis de Granada and Father Fray Pedro de Alcántara; because this maintenance is in part as necessary for the soul as eating is for the body". Undoubtedly, she remembered the experience at the Encarnación, where she forged her project of St. Joseph and the reform, when the religious gathered around her, in what today we would call something like a reading club.

Late writer
In a Spain in retreat, with the emperor already retired in Yuste, the Saint began to write, arguing that she would not say anything that she did not know from experience and that she did it in the style of hermits, in order to "beguile souls".

Along with her production of autobiographical and ascetic-mystical texts, we should not forget her letters, nor her poetry, in which she is sample as a popular troubadour. Her publisher, fray Luis de León, tells us that he met Teresa thanks to her nuns and her works, adding with respect to the mystical texts: "such would be said that the hand of God is carrying the writing". The letters are part of her spiritual pulse and as Palafox, the first compiler and publisher of her epistolary, recalls: "in the family letters the soul and the condition of the author is more evident and his interior and exterior is drawn with more property and more vivid colors". The epistolary genre is the one that best allowed her to be critical and creative, enjoying more freedom to be herself, in the face of censorship, whose shadow hovered over the rest of her production. In this regard, it should be noted that the rest of her works are written as letters to her nuns.

The aforementioned Don Juan de Palafox, in reference letter to the literary production of St. Teresa states: "I have not seen a man devoted to St. Teresa, who is not spiritual. I have not seen a spiritual man who, if he reads her works, is not devoted to St. Teresa. And her writings do not communicate only a rational, interior and superior love, but also a practical, natural and sensitive love".

The figurative arts left special examples of Saint Teresa as a writer, in a parallel phenomenon to the growing cult of that woman wanderer and seeker of God. internship Gregorio Fernández, Alonso Cano, Diego Valentín Díaz, José de Ribera, Felipe Gil de Mena, José de Mora, Pedro Duque Cornejo, Alonso del Arco, Palomino, Risueño, Luis Salvador Carmona and all the masters of the Baroque chose written request from their mentors, the image of the Saint as a writer inspired by the Holy Spirit, static and ready to capture with the pen those ineffable greatness received in a sensitive way. This iconographic subject would not have skill with any of the themes of her life, if it followed in importance that of the transverberation. The scenography and celestial experience of that passage captivated people of all conditions in times dominated by the marvelous, coming to have its own feast since 1726, to celebrate on August 26.

The portraits of Teresa soon appeared in connection with her facet as a writer, in the editions of her works. Readers demanded that subject images by the need to know, physically, the authors of the texts they read with fruition. In the biography of the Saint by Father Ribera (Madrid, 1602), to whom we owe the first poetic portraits of the Saint, we find one of those first representations in an attitude of writing with the financial aid of the Paraclete. It is a version derived from the first and only portrait that Fray Juan de la Miseria made of her in Seville in 1576.

A feminine culture
All those images became outstanding vehicles of communication with the public, since in times when people did not know how to read or write, figurative representations became irreplaceable elements for the dissemination of culture and catechization, together with preaching and other oral and musical means.

St. Teresa felt a great appreciation for women, pondered their qualities and rights, claiming independent and educated women, equal religious, cheerful and prayerful. All these aspects, studied by Fr. Tomás Álvarez, should be interpreted as characteristic of a personality that surpassed her context. From the cultural point of view, a singular episode in her biography is the fact that she - a woman - decided to write a gloss on the Song of Songs, precisely at the same time as Fray Luis de León was imprisoned for his Spanish translation of the biblical poem, arguing "that we women should not be left so far from enjoying the riches of the Lord".

In the Constitutions that he left for his nuns, he ordered, as we have seen, that in the convents there should be a small bookshop and that the chorister sisters, when entering, should have skill to pray the divine official document , an important requirement in that environment of preponderant female illiteracy.
female illiteracy. But without classism nor closed-mindedness, because in the same Constitutions the Admissions Office and profession of non-corist freilas is foreseen and, when in 1577, the prioress of the Carmel of Seville asked her committee on the Admissions Office of a slave or negrilla, the Saint answered her twice categorically: "How much to enter that slave, in no way resist".

Cultural movement
But the most important thing B, in core topic feminine cultural , is the series of nuns writers - writers of quality - that arise in the teresian cloistered world. A whole cultural movement. Among the most notable, it is necessary to mention the prioress of the Carmel of Seville, Maria de San Jose, good poetess and excellent classic writer; to Ana de San Bartolomé, young illiterate initiated in the writing by the own Saint, also poetess and great writer; the young Navarrese Leonor de la Misericordia (Ayanz Y Beaumont), a good historian; the Valladolid-born Cecilia del Nacimiento, an extraordinary poetess and writer; and finally, the singular case of the Riojan Ana de la Trinidad, author of an excellent collection of poems, with 19 sonnets of the highest quality.

In the following centuries, this tradition will be prolonged in a series of women writers, both in Spain and internationally. Some outstanding figures serve as examples. In France, Blessed Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity and Saint Therese, author of the religious book that has most influenced the spirituality of the last century. In Germany, the exceptional case of Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), philosopher, poet and spiritual theologian. In Italy, the figure of Blessed Candida of the Eucharist is still recent, the author of burning writings of Eucharistic piety. In Spain, the figure of Saint Maravillas is also recent and A . Finally, in South America, the delightful pens of two young and exceptional writers stand out: the Chilean Saint Teresa of Jesus of the Andes and the charming Paraguayan Felicia de Jesús Sacramentado, better known as "La Chiquitunga".

What is most remarkable in this brief enumeration is the continuity of that mountain range of high peaks of spirituality and of the pen, which arose from the literary and spiritual fountainhead of St. Mother Teresa, Doctor of the Church. The Swiss theologian Urs von Balthasar rightly wrote that, in the history of religious life, this service of the Saint and her followers to the Church of our time is an exceptional fact.