



Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at Google Books)










                           A CHRISTIAN WOMAN

               [Illustration: DOÑA EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN.]




                           A CHRISTIAN WOMAN

                                  BY

                          EMILIA PARDO BAZÁN

                             TRANSLATED BY

                             MARY SPRINGER

                               NEW YORK
                      CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
                        104 & 106 FOURTH AVENUE

                          COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY

                      CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY.

                        _All rights reserved._

                      THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
                             RAHWAY, N. J.




INTRODUCTION.


“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,