Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851 - 1921)

Emilia Pardo Bazán (16 September 1851 – 12 May 1921) (also known as Emilia, countess de Pardo Bazán) was a Spanish author and scholar from Galicia. Pardo Bazán was born in A Coruña, a city in the region of Galicia, Spain, and the culture of that area was incorporated into some of her most popular novels, including Los pazos de Ulloa ("The Manors of Ulloa") and its sequel, La madre naturaleza ("Mother Nature"). She was also known for bringing naturalism to Spanish literature, for her detailed descriptions of reality, and for her role in feminist literature of her era. Further, she was acknowledged for her creative stories such as Temprano y con Sol, which explicitly describes an ironic misfortune. She married at eighteen to D. José Quiroga, a Galician country gentleman, and interested herself in politics, and is believed to have taken an active part in the underground campaign against Amadeo of Spain and, later, against the republic. In 1876 she came into notice as the successful competitor for a literary prize offered by the municipality of Oviedo, the subject of her essay being the Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijoo. This was followed by a series of articles inserted in La Ciencia cristiana, a magazine of the purest orthodoxy, edited by Juan M. Orti y Lara.