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“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 Galdós 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 Bazán 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. Señora Bazán 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 Coruña, 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 father’s books in Coruña. 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 O’Donnell to Morocco, and the returned soldiers were fairly apotheosized by their exuberant fellow-countrymen. The Pardo Bazáns 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 father’s party, and was exalted to the seventh heaven by the great man’s 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 “Télémaque” 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 Caballero—a 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 Hugo—of course, she tasted the forbidden waters—confirmed her in a liking which she was long in outgrowing.

In 1868, just after she had first put on long dresses, she was married. To make short work with her domestic life, let it be added, that her husband’s name is Don José Quiroga, and that three children have been born to them. During the troublous times that came in with the Revolution of 1868, and throughout the reign of Amadeus, her family was in political eclipse, and with her father she traveled extensively in France and southern Europe, learning English and Italian, and from her industrious practice of keeping a diary acquiring the writing habit. On her return to Spain, she found the German philosophical influence in the ascendant, and to put herself abreast of the intellectual movement of the time, read deeply in philosophy and history. By this time she had come fully to perceive the defective nature of her education, and set herself rigorously to correct it, for some years devoting herself to the severest studies. At a literary contest in Orense, in 1876, she carried off the first prize both in prose and verse, though for three years after that she wrote nothing except occasional articles for a Madrid periodical. Finally, as a relaxation from her strenuous historical studies, she began reading novels again, beginning with contemporary English, French, and Italian writers; for in her provincial home, and in her absorption in philosophical and historical reading, she had never heard of the splendid development of the novel in her own country. At last a friend put her on the track, and then she read with deepening delight.

To her it was the chance magic touch that finally gave her genius its full vent. If a novel was thus a description of real life, and not a congeries of wild adventures, why could she not write one herself? That was the question she put to herself, and the answer came in the shape of her first novel, “Pascual López,” published in the Revista de España, and afterward separately. She began her biography of Francis de Assisi in 1880, but a temporary failure of health sent her off to Vichy. Of this journey was born her “Un Viaje de Novios,” the first chapters of which she wrote in Paris, and read to such distinguished auditors as Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Daudet. Fully conscious now of the place and method of the realistic novel, and of the high value of its development in Spain, her course was clear. Since then her novels have appeared with surprising rapidity. She has all along kept her feet on the earth, writing of what she knows, and thus it happens that most of her scenes are laid in Galicia. As a preparation for writing “La Tribuna,” a study of working women, she went to a tobacco factory for two months, morning and afternoon, to listen to the conversation and observe the manners of the women employed there. Her work has been steadily broadening, and “A Christian Woman,” with its sequel, is the largest canvas she has filled.

Though now definitely and mainly a novelist, her literary activity has been highly varied. Her letters on criticism, published in La Epoca in 1882, evoked the widest discussion, and her lectures on “The Revolutionary Movement and the Novel in Russia,” delivered before the most brilliant literary circle of Madrid, have already been given an English dress. Articles from her pen are a frequent attraction in the leading magazines, and her vivacious series of letters about the Paris Exposition won much attention. As might be inferred from her unflagging productiveness, she is possessed of as much physical as mental vigor. She is of winning appearance and unaffected manners. Since the death of her father, in 1888, she has been entitled as his sole heir to be called a countess; but she does not use the title. “Who would know me as a countess?” she asks. “I shall be simply Pardo Bazán as long as I live.”

Rollo Ogden.