Anonymity, Impersonation and Exile: Silenced Women Writers at the Dawn of Modernity in Spain

Abstract

With the purpose of showing the cultural contributions to the contem-poraneity of female writers and artists, so often silenced, and forgotten, we’ve seen recently a true (re)discovery of these protagonists of the Spanish Silver Age (1900-1936) from the Gender Studies, as well as from the Spanish Contemporary Literary Historiography. The recovery of female writers and artists of that period constitutes not only a way out of “anonymity” for these women, in a process that is, without any doubt, of absolute justice. It also involves necessarily a revision of the canon of the Spanish Silver Age, questioning the assumptions and interpretations consolidated in our critical tradition, incorporating a large amount of literary/artistic production that remained silenced and/or unpublished, as well as identifying the patriarchal nature of our cultural and artistic élites, at the dawn of modernity. One of the most striking cases of this group of “silenced” women of our Silver Age is María Lejárraga, an essential and very active literary figure of the Hispanic Modernism, who devoted himself prolifically to literary translation. Several circums-tances led her to become a true ghost, despite her great relevance for the Hispanic literature of the first half of the XXth century. This “ghostly” nature starts with her own decisions, since she assumed as pseudonym the name of her husband, “Gregorio Martínez Sierra” from the beginning. This fact was aggravated many decades later, during the Franco regime and the exile, when she even lost the rights on her works.