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The Book of Her Life

Teresa of Ávila

An autobiographical account in forty chapters: childhood, illness, twenty lukewarm years at the Incarnation, the conversion of 1554 and, at its centre, a treatise on prayer set out through the allegory of the 'four waters' used to irrigate a garden (chs. 11–22). The second part describes the 'favours' (locutions, visions, raptures, the transverberation) with unusual phenomenological precision, always under the gaze of the confessors who would read it. It is at once confession, a defence against the suspicion of Illuminism, and the first great work of autobiographical prose in Castilian.