Emilia Pardo Bazán

Emilia Pardo Bazán , countess of Brown Bazán (September 16th 1851 - Corogne (Spain) - May 12th 1921 Madrid) (known also under the name of Emilia, countess of Pardo Bazán ) is novelist, journalist, essay writer, critic and Spanish academic. One him must have introduced in Spain the naturalism.

Biography

Woman of letters of an extreme fruitfulness, it wrote forty and one novels, seven dramas, two, more than five hundred and eighty tale and hundred cookbooks of tests; it was a woman with the overflowing activity: one can say that there no was public event during its life in which it did not take part in a way or another.

Childhood

It belonged to a noble Galician family among richest of the Spain: the count Jose Pardo Bazán, title which he inherited in 1890, and Amalia of Rúa. It was his/her mother who encouraged it to read and, at the 9 years age, it showed already a great interest with the writing. In addition to their house of the fixes of Tabernas , its family had two other residences, one close to Sanxenxo, a village of fishermen, and the other in the surroundings of Corogne, the Pazo de Meirás. In the paternal library it could reach readings of a large variety; its preferred books, was it to say, were then Don Quichotte, the Bible and Iliade. In the house of Corogne it lute moreover the conquest of Mexico de Solís and parallel Lives of Plutarque. The books on the French revolution fascinated it. When the family was going to Madrid to spend the Emilia winter followed courses in a French college protected by the Royal House, it is there that she learned how to know the literary work of the Fountain and of Racine. When it is twelve years old the family decides to remain with Corogne during the winter and Emilia studies there with tutors. She escapes from the ritual of female education until refusing to touch with a piano and to take courses of music. She devotes all the time that she can with her true passion: reading.

Literary beginnings

It is established in Madrid in 1869, one year after being married at seventeen years with Jose Quiroga. His/her parents also settled them in Madrid when Jose Pardo was named appointed, but this one well quickly lost its illusions on the policy and all the family left for the France. They travelled in Europe (England, Italy, Germany) and Emilia still learned English and German. Assiduous reader of traditional Spanish, it was also interested in the foreign literary innovations and made known herself like woman of letters with a critical Study of works of the father Feijoo (1876), for which it gained a price, while competing in this contest with Concepción Arenal. The same year was born its first wire, to which it will devote a book of poems entitled Jaime , published by Francisco Giner of los Ríos. In 1879, coinciding with the birth of his/her first daughter, Blanca, it published its first novel, Pascual López , autobiography of a student of medicine where one sees the influence of the reading of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Juan Valera; it is still with the margin of the orientation which its way of writing was to take in the following decade. With a voyage of been engaged (1881), published the year when was born his/her last daughter, Carmen, and with the platform (1882) began its evolution towards a moderate naturalism.

Maturity

In 1882 it started, in the review the Time , the publication of a series of articles on Emile Zola and the experimental Roman, that it was to join together thereafter in volume the palpitating question (1883), which made it recognize like one of the principal promoters of the naturalism in Spain. This book caused such a scandal, that her husband, that the situation terrified, required that it cease writing and that it repudiated its writings publicly; it did not do anything of it, but decided to separate from him two years later, in 1884. The same year it published the young mistress , who treats crises of the marriage precisely. Benito Pérez Galdós, near him also to the naturalism, begins with it an love affair which will last more than twenty years. It however misleads it in short passing fancies with young men like Lázaro Galdiano there Narcís Oller, and while being made forgive. With regard to the naturalism of Bazán Brun, and that of Galdós, vis-a-vis the principles ideological and literary of Zola, it accentuated the connection of the French school with the tradition realistic Spanish and European, which enabled him to approach a more preserving ideology, catholic and right-thinking person in what related to it, because it had never broken with its Catholicism, whereas it admitted the ideological bases of the social determinism and darwinien.

Of its work of essayíste it is necessary to quote moreover the revolution and the novel in Russia , (1887), Polémiques and studies literary (1892) and the modern French literature (1910), in which it continues to remain attentive with the innovations of the end of century in Europe. The method naturalist culminates with Los pazos of Ulloa (1886-1887), its masterpiece, pathetic painting of the decline of the Galician rural world and the aristocracy, and its continuation the mother Nature (1887), plot naturalist which, unlike what one sees in Jose María de Pereda, shows that the instincts lead to the sin. In 1888 it returns visit to Venice to the applicant carlist to the throne of Spain; the articles which she writes on this subject contribute to the scission in the Carlisme.

In addition, Insolation (1889) and Mal of the country (1889) continue to form part in the ideology and esthetics naturalist. Thereafter, coinciding with the death of his/her father in 1890, it evolved to a more pronounced symbolism and a spiritualism, manifest in a Christian woman (1890), the Test (1890), the angular stone (1891), the dream (1905) and Doux sleep (1911). The same evolution is noticed in its tales and accounts, joined together in Contes of my ground (1888), selected Contes (1891), Contes of Marineda (1892), crowned Contes and laymen (1899), inter alia. Doña Emilia used the paternal heritage to found a review written by only it, El Nuevo Teatro Crítico , whose name points out the work of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo.

In a Christian woman and the Test , of 1890, it seems to launch a polemic through the fiction with some of its detractors in morals, like the Father Coloma, Menéndez Pelayo there Pereda. The difference in the age between in love ones, the clash of the affections or duties family and the religious remorse prove in the two novels that Doña Emilia held more account of the opinion that it did not affect it. Adán and Eva , which gathers the novels Mémoire of an old boy (1891) and Doña Milagros (1894), appears the justification of sound idylle with Galdós. But in the Dream (1895) it returns to the etching to depict dusty and changeable Madrid.

In 1892 it founds and directs the review the Library of the woman . She attends congresses like the Teaching Congress, where she denounces the inequality of education between the man and the woman. Still conscious of the sexism in the intellectual circles, she proposes Concepción Arenal with the Royal Académie of the Language, but the candidature is pushed back; one will not accept more Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda nor itself (which was pushed back three times, in 1889, in 1892 and 1912); in 1906 it became the first woman all the same to chair the Section of literature of the Athenaeum of Madrid and the first to occupy a pulpit of literatures neolatines at the Central University of Madrid, although only one student attended his course.

The very rich work of Emilia Pardo Bazán includes/understands also books of voyages ( Through France and Germany , 1889; Through picturesque Spain , 1895) and of the biographies ( Holy François d' Assise , 1882; Hernán the Cortes , 1914). The researcher Varela Jácome discovered a new novel: Forest .

See too

Random links: