Emilia Pardo Bazán

(1852 - 1921)

Born to a noble family in Galicia in 1851, Emilia Pardo Bazán believed at the age of fourteen that there was “nothing worthy to be called a novel unless a man was fired out of a cannon or flung over a cliff in every chapter,” according to a biographer. Her own writing, which often critiqued capital punishment and her society’s patriarchal order, introduced naturalism to Spanish literature. Despite being forbidden to attend college, she was the first woman to become a professor of literature at the University of Madrid.