Emilia Pardo Bazán

Emilia Pardo Bazán, one of the great novelists of the European nineteenth century, extraordinarily popular and translated into many languages ??while alive, contributed decisively (like Clarín, Galdós and other greats of her time) to the change of novelistic register and to the construction of the cultural sphere and the nineteenth-century literary canon. She openly inserted the condition of women and their rights into the public discussion, with such a modern approach that she has no equal among the great writers of the moment. She is a respected, controversial and reviled intellectual, an excellent entrepreneur herself, a notable journalist, critic and historian of literature -among many other facets-. She married, had children, discreetly separated and lived several love relationships, including a famous and intense one with Benito Perez Galdós. She was a woman full of aesthetic, emotional and political contradictions who felt at once cosmopolitan, European and intensely Spanish nationalist; reactionary and progressive; eccentric and subversive and lover of order. Her personality is as forceful as it is elusive and difficult to grasp. Isabel Burdiel's great achievement is to masterfully account for that multiplicity, connecting and distinguishing what she wrote and what she lived, tracing her paradoxes, her decisions, her doubts, her merits and limitations, her victories, her defeats and, above all, her questions, which resonate today "with an intellectual and emotional intensity that make it fully contemporary."