La mujer de letras o la letraherida: Discursos y representaciones sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX (review)

While Virginia Woolf's essays on the hardships of any woman who wished to write in English have been acknowledged since the early 1920s, obstacles facing the professional context of the 19th-century Hispanic woman writer have not been as publicly or rigorously documented and argued. The articles in La mujer de letras o la letraherida: Discursos y representaciones sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX help amend the absence of documentation and analysis of the prejudices working against the Spanish women's authorship in the 19th Century. In addition, many of these articles help restore the Hispanic woman writer's achievements and critical thinking to the record.

Some articles document the general prejudices against women's minds, which were thought to be easily corrupted and too feminine for literary and critical writing. Akiko Tsuchiya document beliefs that women's imaginations should be kept in check because they were morally inferior and vulnerable to moral corruption; thus, women should not engage their imaginations by reading or writing. Women writers' reputations were automatically at stake because by the very act of reading and writing, they were making themselves morally inferior. Several articles make persuasive, well documented arguments that critics often made women feel that "real women" did not educate themselves, much less author novels, essays, or any type of theory or philosophy. Educated women writers might be seen as masculine, neurotic freaks who, when married, demasculinized their husbands. Begoña Sáez Martínez argues that the 19th-century woman writer can't win with the critics: she's either too feminine, or too masculine, and if she's the latter, she's too much like a man.

While male critics tended to dominate the discussion about the question of the woman writer, women writers entered the debate as well. More than one author of these articles documents, in sufficiently different contexts, Clarín's and Galdós's opinion of the woman writer. As Tsuchiya notes, Clarín said that what made Emilia Pardo Bazán a good writer was that she thought like man, but felt like a woman. This book makes clear that the Hispanic woman writer was conscious of the fact that her lot as a writer was more difficult than that of a man, and that some Hispanic women did, indeed, defend women's rights to education and a literary or journalistic career. In this context, some articles document feminist theories of the woman as author and academic, as put forth by Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concepción Arenal, and Gertrurdis Gómez de Avellaneda. Pardo Bazán, for example, insisted that women's work be judged on merit, not on the sex of the writer.

Marital status and the personal life of a woman writer mattered in a way it did not for men. The women writers who managed to support themselves were often widowed or separated, but the married women who wrote, such as Rosalía de Castro, often saw their husbands receive credit for pieces the women themselves had written. This book makes evident that, like in other countries (such as England), successful women writers' personal lives were vulnerable to exposure, scrutiny and criticism, especially if a woman writer's love letters were published, as were those of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Mary Wollstonecraft. Making it nearly impossible to judge a woman's text solely on the basis of merit, male critics blurred the boundaries between text and the woman author in a way they did not do with men.

Some texts, because they were written by women, simply were not judged as historically valuable: as Sylvie Turc-Zinopoulos argues in her article on Julia Codorniu, many women's written achievements quickly disappeared from the record. Providing a basis on which to argue that many Hispanic women wrote professionally, not...