Spanish · 1851–1921
A Galician countess who read Zola and decided Spain needed naturalism, Pardo Bazán published The Burning Question in 1883, a series of essays defending the French naturalists that caused a scandal, cost her her marriage, and made her the most controversial writer in Spain. She wrote twenty novels, six hundred short stories, criticism, cookbooks and travel writing, ran her own literary journal single-handed, corresponded with Galdós, who was her lover for years, and campaigned for women's education with a persistence that got her appointed to a chair at the University of Madrid in 1916 — where the students boycotted her lectures. The Royal Spanish Academy refused her three times on the ground that women were ineligible. She is now read as the finest Spanish woman novelist before the twentieth century and one of its four or five best novelists of any kind.