ENDLESS : Journal of Futures Studies. Vol. 1 No.1 (2018) Pilar de Valderrama, The Guiomar of Antonio Machado. Ignored writer and outraged muse Rubio Alvarez University of Malaga, Spain Email: rubio.al
[email protected] Abstract Pilar de Valderrama, belonging to the Generation of 27, has been one of the many writers forgotten by contemporary literary criticism. In this article we offer an updated biography of the poet and playwright who was also Antonio Machado's muse and we analyzed the personal attack she suffered especially since the 1970s, and the lack of scientific rigor of these criticisms. Keywords: Generation of 27, ignored writer, outraged muse, revendication and lack of scientific rigor. A. INTRODUCTION When I began my research on the muse Machado, the first data came to me from the Montilla Civil Registry, a city in the Campiña de Córdoba, where several generations of Valderrama, Pilar's paternal family lived. After reconstructing the family tree, I began to investigate the publications that had been made about the muse of the Sevillian poet and thus I came across the books by Concha Espina, José Luis Moreiro, Giancarlo Depretis and Miguel Ángel Baamonde, works that I read with great interest. The conclusion I reached, after those first readings, was that Pilar de Valderrama had been an ambitious, careerist and manipulative woman who had used poor Don Antonio Machado to thrive as a "poet." I was deeply disappointed. According to those writers, Machado had been a weak man who had allowed himself to be fooled by a woman much younger than he, a pious retrograde and ignorant; all this seemed to me unbefitting of a man of his category, of an idealist Republican of the left, of a man of integrity.