The traditional life is brief and famous. Periyalvar, a garland maker who strung flowers daily for the god at Srivilliputhur, found an infant girl beneath a tulsi plant in his garden and raised her. She took to wearing the garlands herself before he offered them, admiring herself in a mirror, and when he discovered it he was appalled and threw the day's garland away. The god then refused any garland but hers. She grew up declaring she would marry no mortal, chose Ranganatha of Srirangam, was carried there in procession, walked into the sanctuary, and was not seen again.
The temple institution built on that story is substantial. Srivilliputhur is her town and its temple tower appears on the emblem of Tamil Nadu; Srirangam observes her marriage annually; and she is one of very few figures in the tradition to receive worship as a consort of the deity rather than only as a devotee of one. The garland offered to Vishnu at some temples is still called by her name.
What is historically recoverable is smaller and firm enough: a Tamil poet of the ninth century, composing in a devotional idiom that had women's voices in it already, whose work entered the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the four thousand verse canon that Sri Vaishnavism treats as Tamil Veda. That canonisation is the reason her poems were transmitted intact while most vernacular writing of the period was lost.