A Christian Woman

A Christian Woman

I have heard it told of a great-grandmother of mine, of noble family (grandees, in fact), that she was obliged to teach herself to write, copying the letters from a printed book, with a pointed stick for pen and mulberry-juice for ink. The great-granddaughter who said this is the first woman of letters in Spain to-day; indeed, she is perhaps as widely known as any contemporary Spanish writer, man or woman. Though her achievements do not yet entitle her to rank, as a novelist, with Galds and Pereda, she has conquered a place only second to theirs, and with long years of work before her (she is not yet forty) may even come to rival their great fame. From the Spain that looked with suspicion upon a woman who could more than barely read and write, to the Spain that counts the literary renown of Emilia Pardo Bazn among its modern glories, is a long way; and the chapters recording the struggles and successive triumphs of Spanish women in their efforts to get within reaching-distance of the tree of knowledge, will be, when they come to be written, among the most striking in the history of the emancipation of woman. Seora Bazn must always be a great figure in the record of that educational development, and happily we are able to trace her own progress pretty fully, taking advantage principally of the charming autobiographical sketch which she prefixed to her novel Los Pazos de Ulloa. She was born in 1852, in Corua, of a family which traced its descent on both sides to the most distinguished among the ancient Galician nobility. One of those children whose earliest memories are of delightful hours passed in some safe retreat in company with a book, she was fortunate in having a father with the good sense, rare in those days, to let her follow her bent. She tells us of the happy days she had when enjoying free swing at a library in the summer villa which the family rented by the sea, and later when allowed to browse at her will among her fathers books in Corua. Plutarch and Homer (in translation, of course,) thrilled her young fancy, and whole chapters of Cervantes remain to this day photographed upon her memory, fixed there in those early, sensitive days. Her first attempt to write came at the age of eight, and was born of patriotic excitement. It was at the close of the triumphant expedition of ODonnell to Morocco, and the returned soldiers were fairly apotheosized by their exuberant fellow-countrymen. The Pardo Bazns had two or three honest country louts among the volunteers to entertain at their house, and to the little Emilia the good clodhoppers embodied the idea of military glory as well as any Hector or Achilles. The worthy fellows were up to their eyes in luck, given the best that the mansion afforded, put to bed between lace-trimmed sheets in the best room; but it all seemed too little to the enthusiastic child, and in a passion of adoring homage she rushed off to her room to write a poem in honor of the heroes! It could not have been long after this that she addressed a sonnet to a deputy of her fathers party, and was exalted to the seventh heaven by the great mans extravagant praise of her performance. However, it was not as a poet that she was to find expression for her genius; and though she afterward published a volume of verse for which she still professes a sneaking fondness, she admits that she is not much more of a poet than can be met on every street-corner in Spain. Her education, so far as she did not get it by herself, was principally obtained in a fashionable French boarding-school in Madrid, where Tlmaque was served up three times a day, and where Emilia was given the idea that she had exhausted the possibilities of astronomical science when she had looked at an eclipse through a bit of smoked glass. Later she was turned over to the tender mercies of tutors. Instead of lessons on the piano, she begged her father to allow her to study Latin; but this was quite too wild a thing to ask, even of him, and his refusal only gave her a lasting hatred for the piano. By the time she was fourteen, she was allowed to read pretty much everything, though still forbidden to look into the works of Hugo, Dumas, and the French Romanticists generally. Instead of these, an uncle put into her hands the novels of Fernan Caballeroa most suggestive incident, the woman who worked out the beginnings of the modern Spanish novel, read by the girl who was to help carry it to its highest development! However, her unformed taste thought nothing worthy to be called a novel unless a man was fired out of a cannon or flung over a cliff in every chapter, and her furtive reading of Hugoof course, she tasted the forbidden watersconfirmed her in a liking which she was long in outgrowing. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 54796
Author: Pardo Bazán, Emilia
Release Date: May 27, 2017
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Springer, Mary