This forgotten classic from Germany was a best-selling novel in 1905 and translated into many languages.

It was also widely read for nearly three decades – until the story of a fallen girl from a bourgeois family who sees no other way to survive but prostitution was pushed into the abyss of oblivion because it didn’t fit into the ideal and virtuous image of Germans that Nazi propaganda created. Mute films made of it had the same fate although the 1929 film of G. W. Pabst starring Louise Brooks is much appreciated by enthusiasts like the editor of the again available English edition of the book.

Please click here to read the full review on my main book blog Edith’s Miscellany!

This one is a Spanish classical novel written by a woman who is almost forgotten today although she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times and she was very close to actually being awarded it at least twice.

The Metal of the Dead is often referred to as a socialist novel, a genre that was a bit in fashion in the early twentieth century. So shortly after the Russian Revolution socialist ideology had not yet a bad reputation, but people still set their hopes in it everywhere in the world including the mining area of Rio Tinto in Andalusia that is the main scene of this novel that is considered her best. The plot deals with a general strike that was called there around 1917... and the joys and sorrows of the miners and their families.

For the full review please click here to go to my main book blog Edith’s Miscellany.

The Metal of the Dead - Concha Espina,Anna-Marie Aldaz 

The late eighteenth century uses to be seen as the beginning of modern literature, but it goes without saying that the new novelistic tradition didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Books have been written before and every man of letters added his share to the further development of genres and styles. It’s not much of a surprise that the vast majority of authors were men unless it’s only the impression that we get today because most works of women got lost as time passed and paper decomposed. Poems, plays and narrative products of seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn survived the centuries, but who was she and how did she live?

The biography of Aphra Behn is full of gaps, uncertainties and inconsistencies. She is supposed to have been born in 1640 as the daughter of a barber called Johnson, to have lived in Surinam in her youth and to have married a merchant called Behn upon her return to England. Working as a spy for the English crown plunged her into debt and so she eventually made her appearance as a playwright to earn her bread – with success. But also her poetry and narrative work left a deep impact in literature, notably her short novel Oroonoko (1688). Until her death in 1689 she penned numerous plays, short novels, stories and poems along with several book translations from French and Latin.

Today Aphra Behn is known to have been the first Englishwoman who called herself proudly a professional writer and Virginia Woolf sang her praises for it.

Click here to read my portrait of this impressive as well as somewhat mysterious English woman writer.