Rideout, Judith (2017) Women's writing networks in Spanish magazines around 1900. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7859/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Women’s Writing Networks in Spanish Magazines Around 1900 Judith Rideout BA (Hons), MLitt This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow School of Modern Languages College of Arts University of Glasgow August 2016 1 Abstract As an output of the HERA Travelling Texts project, created with the aim of uncovering the realities of women’s literary culture on the fringes of Europe during the long nineteenth century, this study was conceptualised to find out more about the networks of women writers in Spain around 1900, using the digitised corpuses of contemporaneous periodicals as the primary source material. Each chapter of the study centres on a particular periodical, which is used as the starting point for the community of writers and readers, both real and imagined. This thesis looks at the realities of the literary culture for creative women in the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century, exploring the strategies used by women (and men) to support each other in their literary endeavours, how they took inspiration and courage from each other, how they promoted their own names, and how they were received by wider society. The study will also focus on the transnational nature of this literary culture, looking at how women of different nations influenced each other’s work, with a view to understanding more about how cultural change takes place. Finally, this thesis hopes to persuade the reader that the periodical is a rich and under-utilised resource for discovering more about the lives of women writers and their network of relationships. 2 Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………..……4 Author’s Declaration…………………………………..…..5 Introduction…………………………………………….… 6 Chapter 1: La Luz del Porvenir: Amalia Domingo Soler and her ‘universal family’ of women writers.....................27 Chapter 2: Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento and the female networks inspired by Rosario de Acuña……...85 Chapter 3: El Álbum Ibero-Americano: Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer and her world of female potential.....130 Final Conclusion…………………………………….…..178 List of References………………………………….……183 3 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Henriette Partzsch for her unfailing good humour and infinite patience. I honestly think that if I had had any other supervisor on earth that this PhD would not have been completed as satisfactorily, and I will be forever indebted to her for giving me this opportunity. I would also like to thank Dr Jordi Cornellà-Detrell for his enthusiasm to read my work and for his thoughtful comments, at delicate junctures in my writing when kindness and diplomacy were very necessary. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and support, as they, like me, understand the significance of having one of the Rideout family reach this level of education. 4 Author’s Declaration I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of others, that this dissertation is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at the University of Glasgow or any other institution. Signature: ……………………………………………. Printed name: ………………………………………... 5 Introduction This PhD thesis is one of the many outcomes of the collaborative research project Travelling Texts, 1790-1914: The Transnational Reception of Women’s Writing at the Fringes of Europe (Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain). This Europe-wide project, set out to systematically scrutinise the primary sources of nineteenth-century literary culture, aimed to uncover the contemporaneous reception of women writers on the cultural periphery of Europe, and thus reinsert the women of these countries more fully into the transnational literary narrative. This empirical approach meant, in essence, a setting aside of the preconceived ideas of female literary culture formed in the subsequent century, when the process of canon formation, in Spain at least, had the effect of glorifying a chosen few while erasing the existence of the others. By returning to the primary sources - the historical catalogues from booksellers and libraries, the inventories of translations, the historical press – and using a quantitative, distant reading approach, the Travelling Texts project hoped to uncover much of this Atlantis, and in so doing answer many questions about female literary culture. By finding out which women were writing, what they were writing and how they were received by their contemporaries, an empirical history of Spanish literary culture could be constructed, with the female roles more fully reinstated, along with their literary networks. The PhD studentship of this project was tasked with creating a body of empirical evidence regarding women’s writing in Spanish magazines for the period 1890-1914, which corresponded to the last time window of the project. The aim of the PhD was to find not only the women writers themselves, but evidence of their relationships with other writers and clear evidence of the reception of their texts in wider society, with particular interest in any transnational reception. This would result in a thesis which would not only be a useful resource for future qualitative research, but would also provide useful data for the WomenWriters database, a permanent European repository which is being developed towards a Women Writer’s Enhanced Virtual Environment (NEWW VRE). The data entry resulting from the doctoral research would therefore hopefully ensure that future researchers could access in seconds what might otherwise take months of archival research to uncover, and potentially be cross-referenced or used for analysis alongside other data. The periodical press was chosen as the area of research for several reasons. Its very ephemerality, resistant to the reprinting and multiple editions of the publishing trade, meant that the material found in the magazines would be likely to be very 6 contemporaneous to the readership. Books were known to be prohibitively expensive for many readers, so the reality of the literature actually read in the home was the literature of the periodical press, including the serialised novels of newspapers. It is axiomatic that many nineteenth-century male authors were also contributors to the periodical press, as Edward Bulwer-Lytton makes clear in his England and the English (1833:226): It is a great literary age, we have great literary men - but where are their works? A moment's reflection gives us a reply to the question; we must seek them not in detached and avowed and standard publications, but in periodical miscellanies. It is in these journals that the most eminent of our recent men of letters have chiefly obtained their renown. This quotation lays bare how literary scholarship has historically seen writing in periodicals in terms of the apprenticeship model for authors, ‘one step in the maturation process toward production of the more-venerated genre of the novel’ (Patterson, 2015: 66), not as a valuable genre in its own right.1 It would therefore be of interest to see if what stood true for men was also true for women, and if in the context of my research I would uncover many women writers who had been well-known in their time but since lost to history, not only because of historiographical prejudice against their gender (see below) but because of ‘an unjust politics of reputation that equates shelf space with cultural values’ (Lee, 2005: 199). Certainly, academic research to date suggested that this would be the case in Spain, with Simón Palmer’s 1991 landmark Escritoras españolas del siglo XIX: Manual Bio-bibliográfico featuring the names of over a thousand nineteenth-century women writers, most of whom did not appear as authors of published books. Her groundbreaking work suggested that the periodical press would continue to be a treasure trove for the patient archival gold-panner who had been given the luxury of three years to find the nuggets of information from which a new perspective on history could be constructed, however small. Since the publication of the Manual many researchers have added new information to what is known about Spanish women and their writing during this period, with many focusing on the journalism of these writers and providing useful secondary information to this thesis. However, no researcher (that I have found) has taken the same quantitative approach as this doctorate to create exhaustive studies of each magazine title, in order to be able to make assertions about its female contributors and the 1 This model also does not fit the many nineteenth-century writers who published their novels as instalments in periodicals. While this phenomenon was much more common in newspapers due to their periodicity, during this study I did find women’s novels published in magazines, with novels/novelitas by Patrocinio de Biedma and Faustina Sáez de Melgar in Cádiz, and Mercedes Gutiérrez de Valle in Asta Regia. 7 networks they formed, primarily based around the evidence found within the magazine itself. This view of the periodical press as a rich source of undiscovered information is also supported by Simón Palmer’s (1989b: 54) assertion that, of all of the Spanish women writers of the nineteenth century, less than 20% managed to have a book published.