In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

105 Chapter 5 Madrid–Galicia Princesa del amor hermoso (1909) The breakdown of Sofía Casanova’s marriage to Wincenty Lutosławski so swiftly followed her literary success with both the Spanish and Polish versions of Más que amor that a cynical reader might be tempted to connect the two events. Casanova never openly acknowledged Lutosławski’s remarriage (he began a new family with a former student). She managed to turn this personal ordeal into a great professional opportunity, however, by taking advantage of her success and focusing once again on her writing career. To this end she traveled to Madrid several times during 1907 and 1908, paying extended visits to her mother and younger brother, Vicente (now a published poet and editor). Until her permanent return to Poland in 1914, her principal mission was to reestablish herself in Galician and Spanish literary and intellectual circles (now with the added motivation of making a living, since she could no longer rely on financial support from her husband). Her two elder daughters, who were now adults (María was nineteen and Izabela eighteen), spent a great deal of time in Poland; only ten-year-old Halina remained with her mother. In the winter of 1907, moved—as she recalled in the 1916 ABC article “Diario de viaje”—by her “secreta ansia de no morir aún en la memoria de los poetas” (n.p., emphasis Casanova’s) [secret desire not to die yet in the memory of other poets], she decided to visit Carlos Fernández Shaw, the president of the literary section of the Ateneo de Madrid, to propose a poetry reading. Although (after some prodding) Fernández Shaw agreed, Casanova found the experience traumatic. Later (in the same ABC article) she recalled, “Salí del Ateneo temblando con una pena de soledad en mi alma” (n.p.). [I left the Ateneo shaking and with a lonely pain in my soul.] When the poetry reading at the Ateneo finally took place, it led to a series of collaborations, including the 1910 lecture La mujer española en el extranjero (see Chapter 1 herein). Still, Casanova soon realized that in order to make a 106 A Stranger in My Own Land living, she would need to expand her professional horizons beyond occasional lectures and readings and that to do so would require a concerted change in direction. The financial considerations combined with the social and personal freedom that she seized (even if she had not sought it out) resulted in more determination and, perhaps, less scrupulousness in the choices she began to make. Where she had previously focused on prestigious literary forms—fulllength novels and poetry—she now turned her attention to the mass market, playing the game of marketing and publicity that she hoped would raise her professional profile and, crucially, earn her enough money to maintain her independence in Madrid. At the same time, however, as her lecture at the Ateneo shows, she remained committed to her critical, feminist perspective on Spanish society and culture. In this chapter and the chapter that follows, we follow Casanova’s career during the six subsequent years she spent in Madrid, a period during which— in an attempt to exploit the new audiences brought about by the diversification of the literary market—she made the decision to rebrand herself as a popular, regional (Galician) writer. Especially interesting are the textual consequences of the tension between Casanova’s evident desire to continue her feminist intellectual project and the very real aesthetic and editorial demands of the mass market. These demands were fueled by the explosion in popular fiction linked with the development of the new novela corta [short novel] genre in the first decade of the twentieth century, to which Casanova contributed with her Princesa del amor hermoso (1909). After Casanova’s disagreeable first experience with the demands of the new genre when she was trying to place Lo eterno for publication (see Chapter 3), she appears to have become much more willing to balance her feminist commitment with the limitations imposed by commercial and editorial demands by the time she wrote Princesa. The novel also reveals her participation in the Galician cultural scene then emerging from the rexionalista political movement headed by her great friend from A Coruña, the writer, politician, and historian (and husband of Rosalía de Castro) Manuel Murguía. This new cultural scene and Casanova’s most high-profile contribution to it in the short story compilation...

Share