Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Sand, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the three Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, George Eliot… those are prominent names of nineteenth-century literature still in print. Who hasn’t heard them at least once or twice? In fact, almost everybody knows those women writers almost everywhere in the world. They keep being widely read and their books surely are on many school reading lists. But how about Emilia Pardo Bazán? Who still remembers her outside the Spanish-speaking world?

Emilia Pardo Bazán was a well-read and very open-minded noblewoman from Galicia. She introduced the literary movements of realism and naturalism, which she got to know and appreciate in France, into Spanish literature. Her work and her opinions made her – like Émile Zola in France – the target of much polemic in the deeply conservative Roman Catholic country, and yet, she was never discouraged to continue on her way. Instead of listening to her husband who wanted her to give up writing she separated from him to be free to publish whatever she liked.

Click here to read my portrait of this important and impressive Spanish writer.