Despite the times that ran at the time he was born and raised Emilia Pardo Bazán, her legacy, her famous phrases and her entire career continue to be a cause for celebration today, when the extraordinary became everyday, like the experiences that this renowned Galician woman had.
Pardo-Bazán was a defender of women’s rights and devoted her life to promoting and defending them, not only in her life as an activist, but in her published works, where she included ideas for the modernization of Spain, the imperative of educating women and the participation of women in all the rights that men had.
Emilia Pardo-Bazán and de la Rúa-Figueroa was his full name, he was born in Corunna, city of the autonomous community of Galicia, the September 16, 1851, who later, in 1908, received the title of Countess of Pardo Bazán, awarded by Alfonso XIII as a way of exalting and recognizing his outstanding participation in the world of literature. Daughter of Galicians, her parents were José María Pardo-Bazán y Mosquera and Amalia María de la Rúa-Figueroa y Somoza.
Wit, curiosity, rebellion, the willingness to learn everything that existed around him, was combined in an advantageous way with his father’s conviction that women should have the same rights as men. It was a time when rights were conceptually increasing, as well as their social, philosophical and political importance, at least in Europe, and when movements were raised to demand freedom of worship, the end of slavery and rights for women .
Precisely this scenario is where the figure of Emilia Pardo-Bazán emerged, at the end of the 18th century, when the discussion about women’s rights became a central theme of political debates in Great Britain, Italy and France, countries that she visited and that fueled his eagerness to learn other languages, such as French, English and German.
An accelerated life
Emilia Pardo-Bazán was barely nine years old when she showed signs of mastering the pen, and with the library her father had, she discovered a world of books from which she made her favorites the masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote of La Mancha, as well as The Bible Y The Iliad, from Homer.
He knew the work of La Fontaine Y Jean racine in winter times when his family moved to Madrid, while attending a French school that in turn helped him lay the intellectual foundations to link with the literature of Europe. At just twelve years of age, he ended the family tradition that limited women to learning music and home economics; so he began to train in deeper subjects such as humanities, arts and languages.
She knew the world around her and was aware of the importance of the participation of women in citizenship issues, and, despite the fact that she was unable to attend higher education because training in science and philosophy was prohibited for women, she managed to train through his father’s books and close friends.
Emilia Pardo-Bazán is identified as a poet, playwright, literary critic, translator, editor, journalist, essayist, professor, feminist and Spanish lecturer and a fervent activist of naturalism, a philosophical current that considers that nature is the only principle of everything. that is real.
Emilia Pardo-Bazán, barely 16 years old, married José Quiroga Pérez Deza, and after the wedding the couple made a tour of Spain, to decide, after a while, to settle to live in Madrid. From those trips the chronicles of his journeys emerged, which were published in the newspaper El Imparcial, where he mentions the need for Spain to “Europeanize” and makes recommendations to travel through Europe, every year, at least once, to improve the education.
You will also be interested in meeting another great woman, Gladys Elphick
Intellectual and prolific life
Jaime was born from her marriage to José Quiroga in 1876; Blanca, in 1879; and Carmen, in 1881; already for intellectual reasons and for the literary interests of Pardo-Bazán, the relationship came to an end.
Critical study of the works of Father Feijoo, published in 1876 was the first known work of Pardo-Bazán; it was a writing about one of the most prominent intellectuals of the 18th century. In that same year his first publication appeared, a collection of poems titled Jaime, which consecrated his son who had just been born. In addition, she was a collaborator of Christian Science, a Catholic magazine that he used as a platform to oppose Darwinism.
The Tribune, the first Spanish naturalist novel and the first social novel, is about the story of a working woman in a work environment that takes place in a factory, where a strike takes place whose protagonist is a young woman who fights for workers’ demands. The story includes the love of the brave woman with a man of better position, who seduces and deceives her, leaving her alone with her son.
Emilia Pardo-Bazán is the one who includes the proletariat in the Spanish novel, describing the ways of working in industries, the hard and bloody working days and social mobilization, including the development of the feminine world and the double hours that the workers who fulfill they are workers and mothers at the same time. Pardo-Bazán continued working on his literary interests; her concern went beyond literary polemics, and began to form part of journalism dedicated to politics and initiating female freedom, both socially and intellectually.
Among the published trials are The revolution Y The Novel in Russia, published in 1887; The Spanish Woman, 1890.
In that same year, when his father died, an evolution of his work towards symbolism and spirituality was evidenced, in titles such as:
His stamp is also evidenced in the more than 500 published stories and stories, which were compiled in:
Emilia Pardo-Bazán died on May 12, 1921, at the age of 69, a victim of diabetes.