How to become an intellectual. The self-construction of Emilia Pardo Bazán

Abstract

The essay traces how, at different stages of her career, Emilia Pardo Bazán took advantage of the press (and, at certain points, of public lectures) to project a public image not just as a novelist but also as an intellectual. It argues that, while her exclusion from politics as a woman has prevented her from being recognized as an intellectual, paradoxically it helped her to become an intellectual in the modern meaning of the term as the independent thinker not affiliated to the State or to a political party. Particular stress is placed on the need to recognize her as one of the so-called «intellectuals of 1898».