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SPAIN’S WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, 1890-1920


Dr Kirsty Hooper, University of Liverpool

 

Esta página en castellano

Esta páxina en galego

 

Why this project?

When we look at the official record, it can seem that women writers disappeared from cultural and intellectual life in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the huge advances in Hispanic literary scholarship in general, and feminist Hispanism in particular, over the last 25 years, the myth of women’s absence during the fin de siglo remains largely uncontested. The 19th century is well covered, from the bio-bibliographical point of view, by María del Carmen Simón Palmer’s monumental Escritoras españolas del siglo XIX: Manual bio-bibliográfico, while recent interest in European Modernism has brought a certain amount of recognition for women who began their careers in the 1920s and 1930s. However, beyond a couple of big names (Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos), we know so little about the generation in between – the contemporaries of the “Generación del 98” and the modernistas – that Roberta Johnson referred to the period in 1993 as “a desert for women writers of any kind”.

 

 

http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1concepciongimeno.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1rosarioacuna.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1filomenadato.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1patrociniodebiedma.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1sofiacasanova.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1blancadelosrios.jpghttp://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~chomik/1gloriadelaprada.jpg

Left to right: Gimeno, Acuña, Dato, Biedma, Casanova, de los Ríos, de la Prada

 

What’s the project about?

Although we know very little about them, many women were reading, writing, publishing, and commentating in Spain  on issues of individual, social, local, and national interest throughout the decades around the turn of the 20th century. My research has led me to archives, libraries and catalogues that contain works by scores of women who wrote, translated, published, lectured and taught, but whose names have simply been erased from the historical record - if indeed they ever appeared there at all. Further difficulties arise because so few of these women published the right kind of thing in the right kind of place to be considered writers, as the term is traditionally understood. If we are to gain a fuller understanding of female intellectual culture and its relations with local and national intellectual culture, we need to look not only at academic and imaginative writers, but also the authors of religious and autobiographical texts, children’s literature and conduct books, journalists, translators, educationalists and others, all of whom contributed, in different ways, to the formation of modern Spain.

 

How does it work?

The aim of these webpages is to make available basic information about these women and their work, to provide a clearer picture than we currently have of exactly who was out there and what they were writing. At the moment, I’m doing this primarily by gathering together biographical information and bibliographical references, and linking to existing primary and secondary material. I’m collecting information about women regardless of the language(s) they published in, although my own research interests mean Galician, Spanish, and Asturian are particularly well represented. The content of individual author pages will vary according to the resources available. The index is constantly growing as more authors and author pages are added, so please check back often!

 

This project aims to make available up-to-date bio-bibliographical information about women intellectuals active in Spain during the decades around the turn of the 19th and 20th century. I welcome comments, contributions and links, and am happy to provide more information – just send me an e-mail!

 

 

Index of Names

310 and counting!


 

Author pages

 

 


 

Useful Links

 

Escritoras.com

Biblioteca de mujeres

 

 



Last updated by Kirsty Hooper on
Wednesday, 01 September 2010