Leonor y los virreyes

Leonor and the Viceroys tells the story of Leonor Manrique de Lara, the Maid of Osuna, who, raped at the age of fourteen by Fernando Afán de Ribera Enríquez, Duke of Alcalá, will fight to free herself from the authority and control of her former rapist and live as a free woman, mistress of herself and without submission to any man. Leonor aspires to construct her feminine identity in an oppressive and hostile world, dominated by patriarchal and class-based conceptions of power. The novel harmonizes literary originality with documentary rigor, and fictional events with historical occurrences. It can be read as a family saga of the Enríquez de Ribera lineage, which provided viceroys to Catalonia, Naples, Sicily, and New Spain, offering a faithful portrait of the grandeur and servitude of the high nobility in the 17th century: gentlemen with exquisite taste for collecting books, paintings, and antiques, and who exercised generous patronage of the arts and letters, but who did not hesitate to resort to violence against vulnerable women to satisfy their lascivious appetites. Leonor and the Viceroys can also be defined as a legal drama, since its pages contain a previously unpublished lawsuit, heard in 1623; and, finally, as a political novel, which recounts the conspiracy hatched to overthrow the Count-Duke of Olivares from his position of power, and the intrigues of the Duke of Alba to bring about the downfall of the Duke of Alcalá.