Emilia Pardo Bazán, the anglophile

To mark the centenary of the death of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) – Spain’s pioneering novelist, feminist campaigner, publisher, and academic – this talk will chart her interactions with British literary culture. Those interactions took multiple forms: translating Shakespeare in her free time, commissioning a Spanish version of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, befriending the author Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, supplying The Fortnightly Review with a stark assessment of women’s plight in late-nineteenth-century Spain. This talk will aim to do justice to the significant place that ‘la pérfida Albión’ occupied in the imagination of one of Spain’s great intellectuals of the modern period.

Dr Gareth Wood is a Senior Lecturer in Post-1800 Spanish Literature at University College London. He has a particular interest in the crosscurrents between Anglophone and Spanish literary cultures. He has published on a range of authors, including Leopoldo Alas, Lucía Etxebarria, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Miguel de Unamuno. His monograph on the translation career of the contemporary novelist Javier Marías was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. He is currently writing a study of Pardo Bazán’s “Biblioteca de la Mujer” publishing series.