She contributed numerous articles to the periodical Diario de Burgos and published the children's books Cuentos para soñar and La bella del mal amor.

Daughter of Angel León Lores, a colonel in the Spanish army and Oliva Goyri, María Teresa grew up in a wealthy household filled with books and that was constantly on the move.

As a girl she lived in Madrid, Barcelona and Burgos reading the books of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Benito Pérez Galdós.

She travelled to Berlin, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the Soviet Union meeting the so-called "Revolutionary writers" and writing a dozen articles that were published in El Heraldo de Madrid.

They returned to Madrid where she became secretary of the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals and founded the magazine, El Mono Azul (The Blue Overall) which came out on 27 August 1936.

[5] Contributors included Manuel Altolaguirre, Antonio Aparicio, Vicente Aleixandre, José Bergamin, Luis Cernuda, Antonio Machado, Ramón J. Sender, Lorenzo Varela, María Zambrano and many non-Spanish writers such as John Dos Passos, Vicente Huidobro, André Malraux and Pablo Neruda.

After the German occupation of France they sailed from Marseilles to Buenos Aires on the SS Mendoza where they were reunited with thousands of other Spaniards who had been forced to flee their country.

With the arrival of Juan Perón the political and artistic censorship imposed made life increasingly difficult in Argentina and in 1963, after a 23-year stay in Buenos Aires, they moved to Rome.

On her grave are the words written by her husband: "Esta mañana, amor, tenemos veinte años" (This morning, love, we are twenty years old).