Colección Tamesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 344

A COMPANION TO GALICIAN CULTURE

 Tamesis

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Jo Labanyi
Alison Sinclair
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Julian Weiss
A COMPANION TO GALICIAN CULTURE

EDITED BY
HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

TAMESIS
 © Contributors 2014

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 Contents

Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xi

An Introduction to Galician Culture 1

HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

1. Clerics, Troubadours and Damsels: Galician Literature and Written

Culture during the Middle Ages 13
SANTIAGO GUTIÉRREZ GARCÍA

2. Contemporary Galicia: From Agrarian Crisis to High-Speed Trains 35

XOSÉ RAMÓN VEIGA

3. Santiago de Compostela: Fact and Fetish 53

MARÍA LIÑEIRA

4. The Galician Language in the Twenty-First Century 73

BERNADETTE O’ROURKE

5. Bagpipes, Bouzoukis and Bodhráns: The Reinvention of Galician

Folk Music 93
JOSÉ COLMEIRO

6. Galician Architecture: From Foundations to Roof 115

XURXO AYÁN VILA

7. Cinema in Galicia: Beyond an Interrupted History 135

XAN GÓMEZ VIÑAS

8. The Rural, Urban and Global Spaces of Galician Culture 157

MARÍA REIMÓNDEZ
9. Rosalía de Castro: Life, Text and Afterlife 175
HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

10. Contemporary Galizan Politics: The End of a Cycle? 195

NOA RIOS BERGANTINHOS

Index 213
 Contributors

Xurxo Ayán Vila is a researcher at the Built Heritage Research Group (Uni-
versity of the Basque Country) in Santiago de Compostela, focusing on archae-
ology of the contemporary past, ethno-archaeology, archaeology of architecture,
Iron Age studies and community archaeology. His doctoral thesis studied house,
family and community in the north-west Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age.
Since 2003 he has been director of the archaeological project on the Castros de
Neixón (Boiro, A Coruña). He is a member of the World Archaeological Congress
(WAC), the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) and the Galician
Communication Association of Science and Technology.

José Colmeiro received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley,
and he is currently Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish Studies at the Univer-
sity of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published widely on Hispanic and
Galician cultural studies, contemporary literature, cinema and popular culture.
His most recent book is Galeg@s sen fronteiras: Conversas sobre a cultura
galega no século XXI (2013).

Xan Gómez Viñas studies amateur Galician cinema during the 1970s as part
of a research programme at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He is
founding member of the Cineclube de Compostela and co-director with Pablo
Cayuela of the documentary film Fóra (Out), which focuses on the history of
the psychiatric hospital of Conxo. He has published widely on Galician cinema
in specialist publications such as the Anuário Internacional de Comunicação
Lusófona and the Revista do Audiovisual Galego.

Santiago Gutiérrez García is Lecturer in Romance Studies at the University

of Santiago de Compostela. His main research interests are Galician-Portuguese
medieval poetry and the reception of Arthurian literature in the Iberian Penin-
sula. His publications include the monographic studies Merlín e a súa historia
(1997), A literatura artúrica en Portugal e Galicia na Idade Media (2001),
Orixes da Materia de Bretaña. A Historia Regum Britanniae e o pensamento
europeo do século XII (2002) and A fada Morgana (2003).
x CONTRIBUTORS

María Liñeira is currently finishing her doctorate at The Queen’s College,

Oxford, with a thesis on ‘Literary Citizenship and the Politics of Language: The
Galician Literary Field between 1939 and 1965’. She has lectured on Galician
language and literature at the John Rutherford Centre for Galician Studies (Ox-
ford). Her research specializes in emergent literatures and literary nationalism.

Helena Miguélez-Carballeira is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Ban-

gor University. She is the author of the monograph Galicia, a Sentimental Na-
tion: Gender, Culture and Politics (2013) and has published widely on Galician
cultural history, women’s writing and translation studies. She is the director of
the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales.

Bernadette O’Rourke is Reader in Spanish and General Linguistics at the

School of Management and Languages, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
Her research interests include sociolinguistics of minority languages (in par-
ticular Galician), language attitudes and ideologies, multilingualism, language
policy and planning. She is author of Galician and Irish in the European
Context (2011) and currently leads the EU research network on New Speakers
in a Multilingual Europe.

María Reimóndez is a feminist translator, scholar, writer and activist. She has
published extensively on literary criticism, especially in the Galician context,
and on gender and the nation. She has published seven novels, a poetry collec-
tion and has co-authored the book Feminismos (2013) with Olga Castro.

Xosé Ramón Veiga is Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of

Santiago de Compostela. He specializes in Galician agrarian and political his-
tory. His recent publications, included in edited anthologies, focus on identity
and processes of politicization in Galicia during the first half of the nineteenth
century.

Noa Rios Bergantinhos received an MPhil in Contemporary History from the

University of Santiago de Compostela. She specializes in colonial and postco-
lonial studies and feminism and has published a number of articles and books
on these subjects, including A mulher no nacionalismo galego 1900–1936.
Ideologia e realidade (2001) and A esquerda independentista galega 1977–1995
(2002). She is actively involved in Galician politics, as a feminist and pro-in-
dependence activist.
 9

Rosalía de Castro: Life, Text and Afterlife

HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

It does not take long for anybody interested in Galicia to come across a reference
to the writer Rosalía de Castro. Whether in the textual and visual body of Gali-
cian cultural history or in the material and imaginary landscapes of the country’s
ongoing national construction, the name of Rosalía de Castro resonates with
power, symbolizing a collective heritage. For the first-time or occasional visitor
to Galicia her significance will be felt in the many monuments, statues, street
names and city parks or gardens across the country that bear her name or image:
Santiago de Compostela’s monument to Rosalía de Castro, raised in the city’s
Alameda park in 1917, Rosalía de Castro Street in one of Vigo’s vibrant central
neighbourhoods or the Parque Rosalía de Castro in Lugo are only a few examples
among the many instances of commemorative practices in her name. For the
more specialized reader in Galician culture and history, references to de Castro
form the substrate of a shared structure of meaning which has been seen as
historically bonding the community together with extraordinary success. How-
ever, for all their immediate obviousness and unquestionable coherence to
several generations of Galicians – living in and away from their country – the
life, work and legacy of Rosalía de Castro continue to mount a challenge for
literary critics, historians and public actors engaged in the various discourses
of the nation coexisting in Galicia. Such challenges no doubt find their origin in
the deep complexity of de Castro’s life and writing project, situated as it was on
the margins of late nineteenth-century Spanish literary culture, but they have
been no less conditioned by the thick layers of appropriation, transformation and
transmission that have accumulated around it. In this chapter, I shall attempt an
outline of Rosalía de Castro’s life, texts and afterlife by remaining attentive to
the historical, literary, critical and political dimensions of her legacy as well as
to the way it has been watched over by those invested in the administration of
Galician national culture from the very moment she published her first poem,
La flor (The Flower), in 1857. A general alertness to these four dimensions is
probably the best way to approach a writer who has often been presented as the
176 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

very epitome of Galicia but about whom there has been, for this reason, an out-
standing amount of repetitive, vague or overloaded commentary. The present
chapter aims to offer, therefore, a guide both to Rosalía de Castro – the Galician
poet and prose writer who lived between 1837 and 1885 – and to ‘Rosalía’ – the
Galician national construct extending from the writer’s lifetime to this very day
– in the belief that a more integrated, connective understanding of Galician
culture, and of the pressures under which it has developed since the mid-nineteenth
century, will follow from this approach.

Filling the biographical gap

What little has been found and preserved of Rosalía de Castro’s personal records
boils down to a handful of letters and photographs, some fragmented manuscripts,
pieces of furniture, a list of travel essentials handwritten on the back of a letter
from one of her editors and a lock of her hair. A determining factor for this
meagre booty was her desire, as expressed to her daughters before her death,
that a selection of her unpublished manuscripts and personal papers be burnt.
To this express act of intervention in her posterity we must also add that of her
husband, the historian and founding president of the Real Academia Galega,
Manuel Murguía (1833–1923), who burnt most of her private correspondence
upon her death on 15 July 1885. Beside these irremediable material voids in the
historical records, writing the biography of Rosalía de Castro has been made
difficult by other historical and ideological factors. First, the rapid process of
mythification into national symbol to which she was subjected meant that the
contingencies of her life were eagerly removed from sight by early nationalist
intellectuals. The process of obfuscation was kick-started by Manuel Murguía
himself, who in his several writings on his wife – see, for instance, his chapter
‘Rosalía Castro’ in Los precursores (The Precursors) (1885: 171–200) and his
prologue to the 1909 edition of En las orillas del Sar (On the Banks of the
River Sar) (Murguía 1909) – repeatedly discouraged any probing into de Castro’s
past on the grounds that, as a woman, little of interest could arise from her pri-
vate realm and, as a writer, her literary texts were the only worthy testament of
her life. Twentieth-century intellectuals working in Murguía’s tradition, such as
the cultural historians Eugenio Carré Aldao (1859–1932), Ricardo Carvalho
Calero (1910–90) and Xosé Ramón Barreiro Fernández (1936–), have all to
varying degrees participated in this biographical convention with regard to de
Castro, contributing to a historiographic genre in Galicia that has tried to follow
the historical record while remaining wary of disrupting some of its staged nar-
ratives. Biographical treatment of, for example, the details of de Castro and
Murguía’s married life continues to display a combination of fact and opinion,
often to reiterate the point that theirs was a lifelong bond of companionship,
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 177

when there is historical evidence supporting both this and the opposite interpre-
tation. Creative explorations of this quagmire such as playwright Roberto
Vidal Bolaño’s Agasallo de sombras (Gift of Shadows) (1992), which dramatized
the Murguía–de Castro relationship as one marked by separation and disloyalty,
were met with indignation. Ideological resistance to furthering the historical
understanding of de Castro’s biography has also meant that the remains of her
life documents were either abandoned to dispersion or kept under tight custody
for much of the twentieth century, and only gradually made available by those
who, like Juan Naya – Archivist of the Real Academia Galega from 1946 to 1993
and the sole legatee of Gala Murguía de Castro, the last surviving direct descend-
ant of the family – could gain direct access to them.
In tandem with this tradition of biographical control, other historians have
strained to provide as trustworthy a biographical record of Rosalía de Castro as
is materially possible, often by interrogating received knowledge, seeking out
primary sources of information and avoiding engaging in speculation. It is
largely thanks to the work of the biographers Fermín Bouza-Brey and María
Victoria Álvarez Ruiz de Ojeda that the narrative of de Castro’s life today rests
on a series of irrefutable facts. We know, for example, that a baby girl was
christened under the name of María Rosalía Rita de Castro on 24 February 1837
at Santiago de Compostela’s Hospital Real – today the Hostal dos Reis Católicos
situated on Santiago’s cathedral square. Down on the day’s entry register as ‘de
padres incógnitos’ (of unknown parents), the girl avoided the often dire fate of
the hundreds of children abandoned at the foundling hospital every year, and
was immediately taken away by her godmother, María Francisca Martínez, also
a servant of Rosalía de Castro’s mother, Teresa de Castro. The child’s father as
accredited by the written notes of one of his contemporaries was José Martínez
Viojo, a local priest in Padrón. According to the oral records of the Martínez
family, it is believed that de Castro was raised during her childhood years by
her paternal aunts. However, the Padrón census already shows mother and
daughter living together as early as 1842, when Rosalía de Castro was five years
old (Álvarez Ruiz de Ojeda 1997). From this point onwards, the women lived in
a variety of locations in Padrón and Santiago de Compostela, where there is
historical proof that they rented a room in the disentailed convent of San Agustín,
which from 1848 had functioned as the venue for the cultural activities of San-
tiago’s Youth Lyceum. In her early teens, then, de Castro lived extraordinarily
close to one of the city’s hubs for cultural activity and regeneration, while play-
ing an active role in the Lyceum’s events, notably its theatre sessions. As Álva-
rez Ruiz de Ojeda has shown with the exhumation of a theatre play collection
with annotations by a member of the Lyceum’s declamation club, a young de
Castro played the leading female characters in at least six different plays and
would nurture her dramatic talent both as an actress and a playwright at later
178 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

points in her life (Álvarez Ruiz de Ojeda 2000). However, for reasons still un-
known, Rosalía de Castro moved to Madrid in April 1856 to live with her ma-
ternal aunt and cousins and it was here that her life and writing project would
take a turn for greater visibility. In 1857 she published her first poem, La flor, in
the journal La Iberia, in which her husband to be, Manuel Murguía, subse-
quently published his glowing – and historically eloquent – review of the text.
Introducing the poet as ‘mujer en sus sentimientos, hombre en la franqueza con
que lo espresa [sic]’ (a woman because of her sentiment, but a man because of
the way she expresses it) (Murguía 1979 [1857]: 26), Murguía was moulding the
contours of the model of the new national poet for Galicia as a poet of sentiment,
a task that he assumed from that point onwards as his own.
Rosalía de Castro and Manuel Murguía were married in Madrid on 10 Octo-
ber 1858, and thus commenced a life of itinerant hardship, relentless childbirth
and fitful creative processes for de Castro. It was in the year of her marriage that
she also published the manifesto-like essay ‘Lieders’ in the local newspaper El
album del Miño, a brief but potent piece in which she placed her right to per-
sonal freedom on a par with that of men and condemned a tradition that turned
women into remorseful beings, constantly forced to negotiate their actions and
desires against the benefits of a socially orderly existence. ‘Lieders’ also inau-
gurated the typically proud, ambivalent and tormented tone of de Castro’s writ-
ing, always cut across by a desire to be heard and the compulsion of self-silenc-
ing. Her first novel La hija del mar (The Daughter of the Sea) (1859) displayed
these tensions too, as a fictional exploration of women’s quest for liberty under
the enslaving tyrannies of social ostracism, poverty and the oppressive male
gaze. Dedicated to her husband, as ‘la persona a quien más amo’ (the person I
love most) (de Castro 1859: 13), the text is introduced by a characteristically
shadowy prologue in which she challenges the patriarchal dictum that women
should not devote their time seriously to writing, while falling short of justifying
her authorial position and her unstoppable desire to traverse its associated
‘senda de perdición’ (path of doom) (1859: 17).
De Castro travelled back to Galicia to give birth to her first daughter, Alejan-
dra, on 12 May 1859, thus marking the first of many periods of geographical
separation between her and Murguía. Back in Santiago she took part, at the
request of a group of university students, in the historical play Antonio de Leiva,
which had been organized as a patriotic event to raise funds for the Spanish
soldiers sent to the Moroccan conflict in 1860. Later that year she moved back
to Madrid, leaving her daughter to the care of her mother in Galicia. This was
the period when her novel Flavio was published as a feuilleton throughout 1861
in La crónica de ambos mundos (Chronicle of Both Worlds), but also when,
pierced by an acute sense of longing for a land that was still customarily de-
rided in Spanish portrayals, she is believed to have written most of the poems
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 179

for Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs) (1863), some of which had already ap-
peared between 1861 and 1862 in the magazines El museo universal, Galicia:
revista universal de este reino and Álbum de la caridad. The year 1863 was both
eventful and consequential: after the sudden death of her mother in Santiago,
she published the poetry collection A mi madre (To my Mother), which is to be
read as de Castro’s vindication of a mother figure who, as a woman with a
daughter born out of wedlock to an ordained man, could not have enjoyed stable
social status in her lifetime. Currently 1863 is the year commemorated in Gali-
cia as marking the onset of the country’s cultural revival with the publication of
Rosalía de Castro’s Cantares gallegos some time around 17 May, which was
also Murguía’s birthday. With the publication of Cantares gallegos, a poetry
collection in the Galician language inspired by the oral tradition of Galician
popular knowledge, de Castro was seen as fulfilling the category of national
poet, a role that she would only partially assume with idiosyncratic vision. A
year after the publication of Cantares, for example, she is known to have prepared
an article for inclusion in the Almanaque de la juventud elegante y de buen tono
(Almanac for the Elegant and Decorous Youth) for 1865 which described sar-
castically the undignified and hypocritical lifestyle of the poor seminarians or
‘codios’ (bread-crust eaters), as they were popularly known in Galician society.
After this information was leaked, perhaps by the publishing house’s typesetter,
the local seminarians got wind of the plans to publish this article and threatened
the editor, Manuel Soto Freire, with breaking his office’s windows should the
publication of de Castro’s text not be halted at once (Álvarez Ruiz de Ojeda
2008). The text of ‘El Codio’ has not been preserved.
From 1863 to 1868 de Castro lived in a variety of locations – Vigo, Santiago
de Compostela, Lugo and Madrid – locations that were dictated by her husband’s
activities as a writer and emerging historian. With only one daughter in her
care and encouraged by the relatively positive reception that Cantares gallegos
had elicited, de Castro wrote a large section of her prose production during
these years. In line with the concerns for the conditioning of female authorship
that she had already explored in ‘Lieders’, she published the article ‘Las litera-
tas. Carta a Eduarda’ (Writing Women. Letter to Eduarda) in Soto Freire’s
Almanaque de Galicia (1866). Acknowledging – not without a hint of self-
irony – that she had already and irreversibly walked down that path of no return
that writing is for women, she dissuaded a younger female friend from doing
likewise on the grounds that literary writing has become the prey of a new cast
of editors, critics and aspiring writers whose sheer volume threatens the virtue
of an endeavour where women writers found few accomplices. The theme of
‘undue’ upward mobility was also present in her subsequent short prose piece,
‘El Cadiceño’ (The Man from Cádiz), which was published in Soto Freire’s
Almanaque also in 1866 and was later re-edited in the section on ‘Tipos popu-
180 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

lares de Galicia’ (Galician popular types) of the magazine Revista Galaica in

1875. Here de Castro addresses the themes of acculturation and national self-
hatred through the voice of the Galician emigrant in Cádiz, who returns to his
homeland with a sense of superiority, mocked in the text through the para-
doxes of language hybridity and class displacement. In the same year de Castro
also published Ruinas (Ruins), which appeared by instalments in El museo
universal, a short novel that shares similar motifs and preoccupations with the
longer El caballero de las botas azules (The Knight in Blue Boots), published
only a year afterwards in 1867. While undeniably multi-layered, both of these
texts can be read as explorations of the social, economic and aesthetic tensions
between novelty and emulation arising in processes of historical change. Set in
Galicia and Madrid respectively, these texts reveal de Castro’s keen eye for
structural detail and the manifestations of systemic inequality, whether it be in
the living conditions of the disinherited classes – from the Galician land labour-
ers to the indigenous rural gentry stripped of their land after 1855 – or in the
transversal forms of women’s oppression.
In 1868, with the outbreak of the Spanish Glorious Revolution and the ac-
cess to power of federal republicans such as Emilio Castelar – a personal friend
of the couple, who would later write the prologue to de Castro’s second po-
etry collection Follas novas (New Leaves) (1880) – Murguía was appointed
director of the Simancas Archive near Salamanca, and the couple moved there
for a period of two years, before a second stay in Madrid in 1870 and subse-
quently in A Coruña, where Murguía would start working in the Arquivo do
Reino de Galicia (Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia) from 1871 onwards. The
birth of their second daughter, Aura, in 1868 marked the beginning of a pe-
riod of almost relentless childbirth and itinerancy for de Castro, which put a
strain on her literary writing. The second edition of Cantares gallegos in 1872,
which included a few added poems, remains the only known literary highlight
from this period of her life.
It was not until 1880 that de Castro published her second book of poetry in
Galician, Follas novas, a compilation of poems she had written since her time in
Simancas. The book’s preliminary accompaniments – Emilio Castelar’s prologue,
de Castro’s dedication to the Sociedad de Beneficiencia de los Naturales de Gali-
cia en La Habana (Charity Society for Galicians in Havana) and her own prologue
– offer good indications of the ambiguous significance that de Castro attained as
a Galician writer during her lifetime. Castelar’s prologue displays many of the
tropes of late nineteenth-century Spanish federalist discourse, referring to Gali-
cia as the ‘Escocia meridional española’ (southern Spanish Scotland) (Castelar
1960: 400), while disseminating the commonplaces of Spanish centralism with
regard to rising peripheral nationalisms – in the case of Galicia, that this was a
land of an excessively sentimental people who speak a sweet but primitive and
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 181

archaic language (404). In contrast to the grandiloquent message of the Spanish

politician, de Castro’s interventions curtly address the heart of her poetic work.
In her dedication to the Sociedad de Beneficencia de los Naturales de Galicia in
Habana (Charity Society for Galicians in Havana), which had named her its
honorary member back in 1872 and which had played an instrumental role in the
materialization of Follas novas, de Castro acknowledges that the rehabilitation
of Galicia had been a core aim of her writing. Deftly appealing to readers’ gender
expectations at the time, however, she utilizes the trope of feminine sensitivity
and melancholia to elaborate on what she presents as the pressing social problems
of Galician society, and emphatically, ‘as innumerables coitas d’as nosas mul-
leres’ (the countless hardships of our women) (de Castro 1960: 418). The preserved
journalistic writings she published subsequently in 1881 displayed these central
concerns of hers, to varying effects. In 1881 she published the four instalments
of her piece ‘Padrón y las inundaciones’ (Padrón and the floods) in La ilustración
gallega y asturiana. Here, in a barely disguised dialogue with Eduardo Gasset y
Artime, by then a Member of Parliament for Padrón and the editor of the maga-
zine El Imparcial, but also a former friend of de Castro since her early Madrid
years, the author reminds politicians and public figures of their duty towards the
people they represent and reiterates the unfairly unequal treatment that Galicia
constantly received, in contrast with other parts of Spain (de Castro 1960: 471).
Between March and April 1881 she published her controversial text ‘Costumbres
gallegas’ (Galician customs) in Los Lunes del Imparcial, where she portrayed
Galician inland and coastal populations as deeply hospitable, and included as
proof of their affable and non-judgemental character the persistence of the custom
known as ‘hospitable prostitution’, whereby, in de Castro’s own words:

si algún marino que permaneció por largo tiempo sin tocar tierra, llega
a desembarcar en un paraje donde toda mujer es honrada, la esposa, hija
o hermana pertenecientes a la familia en cuya casa el forastero haya de
encontrar albergue, le permita por espacio de una noche ocupar un lugar en
su mismo lecho. (de Castro 1960: 491)

(if a sailor who has been long at sea arrives in a place where all women are
honourable, the wife, daughter or sister of the family in whose home the
newcomer finds shelter will allow him to share her bed for the period of
one night.)

It is known through a preserved fragment of the Vigo daily La Concordia,

included in Juan Naya’s anthology Inéditos de Rosalía (Rosalía’s Unpublished
Pieces) (1953: 95–6), that her article elicited irate reactions from those who saw
in it an unnecessarily damaging portrayal of Galicia. Such reactions brought
182 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

about a rupture between de Castro’s writing and the country’s cultural revival,
now developing apace, with a burgeoning of regionalist texts and authors serv-
ing a variety of agendas. For de Castro this personally inflicted rupture meant
her practical isolation from cultural contact and activities during the last years
of her life, which she spent living with her children in the rented Casa da Matanza,
today her museum on the outskirts of Padrón. She refused, for example, to al-
low her work to be included in Francisco Portela’s anthology Colección de
poesías gallegas de varios autores (Collection of Galician Poems by Various
Authors) (Portela Pérez 1882), a decision that was communicated to the an-
thologist via a letter from Murguía writing on her behalf (Álvarez Ruiz de
Ojeda 1996: 390–1). In a personal letter to her husband dated 26 July 1881, de
Castro pledged never to write in Galician or about Galician matters again, a
promise that she would only partially maintain. Her last publication, the Cas-
tilian-language En las orillas del Sar (On the Banks of the River Sar) (1884),
is certainly infused with the author’s revelling in self-inflicted isolation, themes
of offence and insult, and the little mentioned anti-saudade message of her
poem ‘Era la última noche’ (It Was the Last Night), in which she describes how
Galician men leave their land unemotionally for the promise of a better future
(de Castro 1992: 344). But this poetry collection also contains one of de Castro’s
towering poems of national protest and indictment, ‘Los robles’ (The Oak Trees),
in which she combines the characteristic ecological hypersensitivity of much
of her writing with a chant to Galicia’s dignity, in the face of external colonial-
ist pressures and internal indolence. A specific passage in this poem stands out
for its chilling premonition of how the history of the writer’s life and posthumous
legacy has become a metaphor of Galician national neglect: ‘Estremécese el
alma pensando / dónde duermen las glorias queridas / de este pueblo sufrido,
que espera / silencioso en su lecho de espinas’ (The soul shudders to think / of
where the loved glories lie / of this wretched nation that waits / silently on its
bed of thorns) (de Castro 1992: 333).
The story of de Castro’s last years and death strikingly echo the above intima-
tion of neglectful posterity. En las orillas del Sar was either negatively reviewed
or glossed over by Spanish literary history and criticism (Alonso Nogueira 1999).
The correspondence among the members of the Charity Society for Galicians
in Havana further shows that they were aware of the material and physical hard-
ship she was undergoing, an awareness that culminated in the publication on 9
December 1883 in Havana’s El Eco de Galicia of Waldo Álvarez Insua’s call on
all Galicians in Cuba to contribute funds for the woman who should be treated
as an ‘emperatriz de su tierra y reina en todas partes’ (empress of her country
and queen of all parts), but who was, however, dying unsung and unhonoured
(Álvarez Insua 1883, in Neira Vilas 1992: 49). A sum of 1,732 Cuban pesos was
collected and conveyed to de Castro in her home in the last year of her life
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 183

(Neira Vilas 1992: 47). After she died of uterine cancer on 15 July 1885 and was
buried with little ado in the local cemetery of Adina, it was again the Galician
communities in Cuba that pressed for what they saw as a more dignified resting
place for the writer. In fact the first printed news of de Castro’s death in Cuba,
which appeared in the weekly Galicia moderna, included the suggestion that a
mausoleum should be erected to house her remains in that cemetery. However,
the receiving institution in Galicia for the gathered Cuban funds, the Sociedad
Económica de Amigos del País (Economic Society of the Friends of the Country),
later asked for permission to consider a more appropriate location for the mau-
soleum, which was finally erected in a secularized chapel within the Convent of
Santo Domingo de Bonaval, today known as the Panteón de Galegos Ilustres
(Pantheon of Illustrious Galicians). Six years after her death, on 25 May 1891,
Rosalía de Castro’s corpse was exhumed and carried by train to Santiago de
Compostela in a ceremony that was partially hijacked by the city’s curia and
political elites. Critical voices, including that of Maruxa Villanueva, the actress
and singer who between 1971 and 1998 lived and worked in Rosalía de Castro’s
museum, have repeatedly called for the return of the writer’s remains to the place
that she so loved, and where she had asked expressly to rest in peace. To this day
the site of Rosalía de Castro’s remains continues to be one of the contested
spaces of Galician national struggle: used traditionally as the ceremonial site for
the celebrations of the day of Galician culture and the Día da Patria on 17 May
and 25 July respectively, it has also since 2010 been a source of revenue for the
Catholic Church, which regained property rights over it thanks to a favourable
verdict by the Spanish Court of Justice.

Ways of reading Rosalía de Castro

Rosalía de Castro was able to see some of the fruits of her literary labours dur-
ing her lifetime. As early as 1865, for example, a book on the history of San-
tiago de Compostela included a three-page biographical sketch of her life and
literary achievements up until that point, in a eulogizing tone (Moreno Astray
1865: 381–3). Contemporary writers like Valentín Lamas Carvajal (1849–1906)
explicitly saw her work as a guiding model and some of her poems were trans-
lated soon after their publication, as in the case of Víctor Balaguer’s Catalan
translations of ‘Castellanos de Castilla’ (Castilians of Castile) and ‘A gaita
gallega’ (The Galician Bagpipe), which he included in his anthology Poesías
catalanas (Catalan Poems) (1868: 125–34). None of the tokens of recognition
she received during her lifetime, however, would reach the levels of devotional
admiration that her figure has attracted in Galicia since her death. It is impor-
tant to remember, nevertheless, that much of the literary criticism of de Castro’s
texts during the twentieth century – both in Galicia and Spain – cannot be
184 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

disentangled from the broader context of Galician–Spanish relations and the

history of their unequal power struggles. Many of the recurrent tropes of tra-
ditional Rosalian scholarship can be understood as part of the semantic network
associated with such struggles.
Early twentieth-century commentary on de Castro often revolved around
the identification between the author and the Galician feminine ideal. From the
several journalistic articles that Spanish novelist Azorín wrote on de Castro
(1914, 1929) to Augusto González Besada’s acceptance speech at the Spanish
Royal Academy (1916) or Eugenio Carré Aldao’s bio-bibliography of the author
published in the bulletin of the Royal Galician Academy between 1926 and
1927, the idea that Rosalía de Castro was the personification of the pure and
virtuous Galician woman guided many an enlightened pen during this period.
The implications of this trope are to be found at the political level of analysis
if we take into account that, for a Galician nationalist movement still in the
process of moulding its symbols, securing the respectability of its women as
the guarantors of national values was an important priority. From the perspec-
tive of commentators invested in the values of Spanish centralism, however,
the trope of Rosalía as the epitome of Galician women’s virtues served a dif-
ferent agenda. Through overemphatic portrayals of the author’s supposed
modesty and capacity for resignation, these texts enforced the message that
Galicia was, likewise, a naturally humble and resigned nation, content – and
virtuously so – with its unfortunate lot. Azorín’s exhortation that the more si-
lence around Rosalía’s legacy, the better justice would be served to her figure
is an example of the often meandering patterns of colonial ideology brandished
in her name (Azorín 1930b [1929]: 188).
A similarly ambivalent yet ubiquitous metaphor of traditional Rosalian
scholarship is the one that has identified the author with that particular form of
Galician-Portuguese sentimentality known as saudade. A powerful ethno-
philosophical construct in Galician-Portuguese cultural and intellectual his-
tory, the idea of saudade – roughly, a state of emotional sensitivity arising in
the face of loss – has also been utilized by Galician national discourses as a
way to emphasize the country’s Atlantic and Lusophone, as opposed to Castil-
ian, identity. While the identification of de Castro’s poetry with raw, unmedi-
ated sentiment was well underway soon after the poet’s death, explicit definitions
of her figure and legacy as the utmost symbol of Galician saudade have been
a fixture of much of the commentary on her work, particularly by the prominent
figures of Galician cultural nationalism throughout the twentieth century. Ramón
Otero Pedrayo’s acceptance speech at the Royal Galician Academy in 1929
offered a protracted explanation of how saudade found a perfect vehicle in de
Castro’s poems (Otero Pedrayo 1931). Later texts, such as Ramón Piñeiro’s
chapter included in the paradigmatic anthology 7 ensayos sobre Rosalía (7
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 185

Essays on Rosalía) (Piñeiro 1952) or his specific chapters on de Castro in

Filosofía da saudade (Philosophy of Saudade) (1984), and Ricardo Carballo
Calero’s literary criticism on de Castro’s texts, continued to elaborate on this
association. In the collection Estudios Rosalianos: Aspectos de vida e obra de
Rosalía de Castro (Rosalian Studies: Aspects of Rosalía de Castro’s Life and
Oeuvre), Carballo Calero stated that: ‘Rosalía é, por autonomasia, o poeta da
saudade, non a saudade de Teixeira de Pascoaes, de inspiración panteísta, senón
a saudade como sentimento da singularidade do ser, a pura saudade de Piñeiro’
(Rosalía is, by right, the poet of saudade, but not of Teixeira de Pascoaes’s
saudade, which is of pantheist inspiration, but rather of saudade as the feeling
of the uniqueness of being, that is, Piñeiro’s idea of pure saudade) (1979: 105).
It was through abstract statements in this vein that the vocabularies of Galician
cultural resistance could find an outlet during the Spanish dictatorship, and a
large part of this resistance was certainly carried out in the name of Rosalía de
Castro’s significance for Galicia.
After 1981 and during the post-autonomy period, new and more combative
readings of de Castro’s texts began to crop up. This was a period when publica-
tions such as the collection Rosalía de Castro: Unha obra non asumida (Rosalía
de Castro: An Unacknowledged Project) (António Souto 1985) or Francisco
Rodríguez’s Análise sociolóxica da obra de Rosalía de Castro (Sociological
Analysis of Rosalía de Castro’s Work) (1988) appeared, whose main gist was to
reframe the study of de Castro’s writing project in line with – but also ahead of
– nineteenth-century ideologies of social justice, including utopian socialism,
feminism, anti-colonialism and the abolition movement. The first pioneering
feminist readings of de Castro also appeared during this period in the shape of
Teresa Barro’s Cartas a Rosalía (Letters to Rosalía) (1981) and the inaugural
monographic issue of the feminist journal Festa da palabra silenciada (Celebra-
tion of the Silenced Word) in 1985. Feminist Rosalian scholarship since then has
tended to unpack the deep-running gender conflict in de Castro’s biography and
oeuvre, as an author who was extraordinarily sensitive to the grim conditions of
Galician female peasants but also to the new enslaving risks that capitalist con-
sumerism placed on subjectivities in general, and on bourgeois women in par-
ticular. As feminist scholarship on de Castro has cautioned, however, the voice
accorded to women in her texts is never a fully liberating one, but, rather, is one
that mixes the paradoxes of desire and agency with those of (self-)repression or
acquired cynicism. More recent appraisals of the complex gender politics in de
Castro’s texts, which range from the different critical explorations included in the
collection Canon y subversión: la obra narrativa de Rosalía de Castro (Canon
and Subversion: Rosalía de Castro’s Prose) (González Fernández and Rábade
Villar 2012) to research on the relations of friendship between de Castro and
other contemporary female writers (Álvarez Ruíz de Ojeda 2010) or on her per-
186 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

sonal library at the time of writing her first novel (Ribao Pereira 2012), have
tended to emphasize the multi-layered nature of her feminist message. Overall,
while the mannerisms of a critical tradition rooted in cultural resistance still play
a part in much commentary on the author, ways of reading Rosalía de Castro
today show a thoughtfulness regarding the complexity and richness of her texts
and authorial position as well as of their many uncharted meanings.
Among this cluster of uncharted meanings the complex poetics of affect in
de Castro’s texts still offers a fertile field of enquiry. From mid-twentieth-
century studies of the psychoanalytical origins of ‘Rosalía’s’ tenderness and
vulnerability (Rof Carballo 1952: 141–8) to Machado de Rosa’s bio-literary
commentary of the amorous dimension of her poetry (Machado de Rosa 1954)
or Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s more recent study of de Castro’s narrative characters
as showing a dysfunctional emotional excess (Charnon-Deutsch 2012), a con-
tinued line of critical work has explored the role of emotions in de Castro’s
work. However, the focus of this type of enquiry, particularly in the Galician
context, has been on ‘soft’ emotions such as melancholia or misplaced sadness,
while strong, negative emotions such as remorse, resentment or revengeful
feelings have not been analysed at length. References to a deep remorse find
their way among the deceivingly merry poems of Cantares gallegos. The owl
in ‘Eu ben vin estar un moucho’ (I Clearly Saw the Owl There) (1992: 72–4),
which the poetic voice tries bravely to confront, acts as a panoptic reminder of
a haunting guilt, with the feelings of shame and fear finding a voice in the
murmuring nature surrounding the woman on a solitary walk. More emphati-
cally in Follas novas, negative emotions such as hatred and rancour are expressed
with piercing logic. In one of the poems in the section ‘¡Do íntimo!’ (From
inside!), for example, a poetic voice tormented by the passing of time observes
how the flame of rancour, unlike that of love, cannot be smothered (1992: 176).
Often too, the benefits of wisdom are reduced to those of learned cynicism and
of knowing how to anticipate life’s disappointments: ‘I eu dende o meu cor-
runcho sorriréime / cun sorrir triste e negro’ (And I will grin from my little
corner / a sad and black grin) (1992: 215). Noticeably in Follas novas too, there
is an accumulation of references to dirt – mud and bile, stains and stenches –
that goes hand in hand with the poetic voice’s declining mood and the book’s
undercurrent of restrained resentment.
On the flipside of the dark affective dimension of de Castro’s poems there
is the undeniable vision of a constructive project. Her final and perhaps least-
read novel, El primer loco (The First Madman) (1881), is the one where the
parallel processes of subjective and collective experience become more closely
intertwined. The novel takes the perspective of Pedro’s self-narrative, which
springs from his experience of betrayal and abandonment on the part of his
adored Berenice. The construction of Pedro’s love plays a central role in the
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 187

construction of his subjectivity, to the extent that feeling and subjective being
become inextricable, even in the face of persistent external contradiction: ‘Be-
renice es una mujer a quien he amado, a quien amo, a quien amaré mientras
exista algo mío, una sola partícula, un solo átomo de mi ser en este mundo’
(Berenice is the woman I have loved, the woman I love and will love for as long
as there is something mine, a single particle, an atom, in this world) (de Castro
1989, vol. 2: 367–8). However, as Pedro’s subjective vision retreats into fantasy
and hallucination, a powerful nexus between affect and place emerges. Through
a poetics of propinquity, the place of Pedro and Berenice’s love, the surround-
ings of the old convent in Conxo which was on the point of becoming the first
Galician psychiatric institution in 1885, becomes also the site of his lucidity,
which is as individual as it is social. In contrast with Berenice’s new lover, a
man from New York referred to as a ‘bárbaro, que hacía recordar los feroces
guerreros germánicos’ (barbarian, who reminded one of the ferocious Ger-
manic warriors) (de Castro 1989, vol. 2: 388) and who offered her a life of errant
travelling, Pedro relishes the feeling of rooted belonging and proximity. Towards
the end of the novel, through the counsel of Pedro’s dying uncle, affective
rootedness is channelled into the urge towards philanthropy, and, specifically,
the desire to do something meaningful for one’s country and its battered soci-
ety. By changing his love for the idealized woman into love for the tangible
places of his sentiment, Pedro’s ruminations become lucid: ‘No llevaba yo in-
tención de alejarme de Santiago; precisamente todos mis planes debían y deben
realizarse aquí’ (I had no intention of leaving Santiago; in fact all my plans had
to be carried out and ought to be carried out here) (de Castro 1989, vol. 2: 417).
Meaningfully, his plans to stay in Santiago, both because of and despite the
suffering he experienced there, are transposed into the novel’s final social mes-
sage on affect, place and late nineteenth-century discourses on the medicaliza-
tion of madness. Against Pedro’s dystopian vision of ‘los espítitus de los pobres
locos, muertos en medio de los caminos o lejos de su patria’ (the spirits of the
wretched mad people, lying dead in the streets or far from their country) (425),
the new psychiatric hospital in Conxo becomes the place of respite for ‘the first
madman’ and his like, a ‘refugio de almas como la mía, agobiadas por incura-
bles dolores, lugar de quietud para gentes que, como yo, aman estas hermosas
alamedas, y estos campos, siempre frescos y sonrientes’ (refuge for souls like
mine, burdened by incurable pains, a place of quietude for people who, like me,
love these beautiful poplar groves, and these ever fresh and smiling fields) (426).
In contrast to the intimations of nomadic desire in de Castro’s early-life novels
La hija del mar (The Sea’s Daughter) and Flavio, El primer loco remains a final
tribute to personal peace in one’s place.
188 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

Managing afterlife
On 26 July 1885, eleven days after Rosalía de Castro’s death, the only Galician-
language periodical of the time, O Tío Marcos da Portela, announced on its
front page that 15 July 1885 had been a day of mourning for Galicia. In his
front-page obituary the periodical’s editor, Valentín Lamas Carvajal, wrote
clear-headedly: ‘¿Que facemos en vida pra honrar ôs noso xénios? ¿Que facemos
co-eles dempois de mortos?’ (What do we do to honour our geniuses during
their lifetime? What do we do with them once they’re dead?) (Lamas Carvajal
1885: 2). These words resonate powerfully to this day, when the question of
Rosalía de Castro’s posterity and who can legitimately derive symbolic – and
material – capital from it remains a contested issue. Manuel Murguía outlived
his wife by twenty-eight years, a period when one of the main institutions of
Galician cultural nationalism, the Real Academia Galega, and the movement’s
political discourses came into being. This meant that a partial rupture developed
with regard to de Castro’s cultural legacy in the first decades of the twentieth
century, with the old-style regionalists led by Murguía bent on preserving a
saintly image of the writer, and the emerging voices of political nationalism
turning elsewhere for stronger models of activism and citizenship. This was a
time when the sentimental metaphors that earlier Galician regionalism had
promoted, with de Castro as their figurehead, began to be perceived by the new
‘political’ men of the Irmandades da Fala (Language Brotherhoods) as ulti-
mately serving a centralist agenda. Manuel Murguía’s interventions on the 1909
edition of En las orillas del Sar, which added several religious poems so far
unpublished and a prologue full of pious references to the woman ‘en quien
puede decirse que estuvieron representadas todas las grandes cualidades de la
mujer gallega’ (in whom, one can say, all the great qualities of Galician women
were represented) (Murguía 1909: xxx), were a prime example of the kind of
discourse that Galician political nationalism, with its hope for the advent of a
new intransigent and combative Galician hero, was trying to avoid.
Despite systematic efforts to quash or circumvent the radical message of her
texts – by Spanish centralism and Galician traditional cultural regionalism alike
– commemorating Rosalía de Castro remained an act of risky defiance through-
out the twentieth century. The year of her birth centenary, 1937, became an
eloquent example of just how politically significant a celebration of her legacy
would have appeared at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Except for a few
formulaic expressions and votive Masses, the new fascist regime in Galicia did
not allow any significant memorial gesture in the name of the author, which
meant that the marking of her birth centenary had to occur in the geographies
of Galician exile. As a result, an anthology of de Castro’s poems was published
in 1939 in Buenos Aires under the rubric ‘Edición Centenario Rosalía’ (Rosalía’s
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 189

Centenary Edition) and with a prologue by the exiled Galician writer Eduardo
Blanco Amor. Dedicated to the Argentine writers Victoria Ocampo, María de
Villarino and the Jewish aristocratic Dalila Saslavsky, Blanco Amor’s text can
be read as a rich, transitional piece, still containing some of the figures of tra-
ditional Rosalian discourse (her supposed lack of vanity, her saintly halo), but
also pointing at the dangers of her constructed, mythical posterity and the
liminal character of her poetry: of the poems in Cantares he says, for example,
that they are ‘en el fondo, poemas polémicos, de contraste; es decir obra de
emigrante’ (deep down, polemical poems, poems of contrast; that is, the work
of a migrant) (Blanco Amor 1939: xii).
During the dictatorship two Rosalian spaces consolidated as sites of ritual
commemoration where, paradoxically, both formulaic and combative forms of
remembrance took place. The traditional Misa por Rosalía (Mass for Rosalía),
spearheaded in 1932 by Xosé Mosquera and Manuel Beiras and held every year
since then on the eve of Galicia’s day on 25 July, became one of the few allowed
events for ‘national’ commemoration during the dictatorship. But the ‘Mass for
Rosalía’ was also an outlet for political dissent, particularly in the last years of
the dictatorship. On 25 May 1970, for example, the daily La Voz de Galicia
included a note in its section on public order which told of how Xaime Isla
Couto, one of the founding members of the Galaxia publishing house in 1950,
had been arrested by the civil guard for shouting in favour of Galician independ-
ence after a Mass in memory of Rosalía de Castro in the Convent of Santo
Domingo de Bonaval, ‘mientras se cantaban diversos himnos’ (while various
anthems were sung) (La Voz de Galicia, 25 May 1970: 9). Also in 1970, an
important initiative took place which aimed to put an end to the decades of
inactivity around the Casa da Matanza, the rented house where de Castro had
died and which had remained unclaimed by Galician nationalism until 1947,
when it was finally purchased from its neglectful owner. Following a spontane-
ous call for action during the ceremony for the Pedrón de Ouro award in 1970,
a popular subscription channelled through the offices of La Voz de Galicia and
cultural associations across the country raised about one and a half million
pesetas for the restoration of the house and garden and their transformation into
today’s Casa-Museo de Rosalía. The details of this subscription reveal an ex-
traordinary capacity for popular activism in Galicia at the time, with Galicians
from all walks of life, including doctors, seamstresses, sailors, can factory
workers, land labourers, teachers and bookshop owners, contributing money
to the cause. Donations in the memory of Galician nationalist republicans
Ánxel Casal and A. Daniel R. Castelao were registered on the pages of La Voz
– which published lists of contributors almost on a daily basis – and need to be
understood as gestures of anti-fascist remembrance during the very last years
of the dictatorship. Hefty contributions by figures of Galician cultural resistance
190 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

– including Domingo García Sabell, Celestino Fernández de la Vega and Ri-

cardo Carballo Calero – were also made.
Paradoxically, the fact that the Museum of Rosalía de Castro was only
made possible by virtue of Galician popular support is seldom remembered,
while more ritualistic uses of this space have been favoured by its board of
trustees (the Patronato Rosalía de Castro established in 1949, today a Founda-
tion), which has had constantly to negotiate its existence and social function
in the context of requests for government funding. As a result, up until its
refurbishment in 2013, the Casa-Museo’s museographic discourse, with its
focus on its status as a ‘place of pilgrimage’ and the sanctified treatment of
the author’s deathbed, was more centred on the mythological portrayal of
‘Rosalía’ than on historical substance. The debate on the legitimate political
use of Rosalía de Castro’s name and places was reignited in 2013, the year of
the 150th anniversary of the publication of Cantares gallegos, when the New
Year message of the president of the Xunta de Galicia at the time, Alberto
Núñez Feijóo, was broadcast from one of the rooms of the museum, notably
the one housing Murguía’s grand writing desk. At the height of the Partido
Popular de Galicia’s overtly anti-Galician language and cultural policies, the
president’s message – which overplayed the idea of Galicians’ adaptability to
adversity and ‘Rosalía’s’ universal message of solidarity, but mislabelled the
museum as the author’s birthplace – was received by many as unbearably
banal and insulting. Expressions of affront grew increasingly bemused when
the government again chose the Museum of Rosalía de Castro as the venue
for its official celebration of the International Day of Working Women on 8
March 2013, when the writer Marta Rivera de la Cruz, an outspoken sup-
porter of the anti-Galician organization Galicia Bilingüe (Bilingual Galicia),
was invited as a keynote speaker. Against protestations of opportunism and
illegitimate political use on one side (Villar 2013), and claims that ‘Rosalía
de Castro é de todos’ (Rosalía de Castro belongs to everybody) on the other
(Angueira 2013), the author’s posterity continues to provide ample ground for
dispute about Galician identity and nationhood. But such disputes are no
longer impeding new historicizing approaches to the writer’s life and legacy,
for which the commemorative year of 2013 also proved a watershed. The
exhibition ‘No principio foi o verso: Rosalía de Castro’ (In the beginning
there was the verse: Rosalía de Castro) held in Vigo between May and August
2013 offered an exhaustive historical contextualization of de Castro’s life,
with particular focus on the progressive intellectual circles mushrooming in
mid-nineteenth-century Vigo and the instrumental role these played in the
publication of Cantares gallegos. Innovatively approaching ‘the myth of
Rosalía’ as a historical construct and avoiding the sentimentalized treatment
of the many first-hand historical objects and records on display, this exhibition
 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 191

marks the triumph of historical interpretation over rhetoric in the history of

critical commentary on Rosalía de Castro’s life and work. Indeed not a bad
place to start studying her legacy all over again.

Works Cited and Suggested Reading

Works Cited
Primary
de Castro, Rosalía (1859). La hija del mar. Vigo: Imp. de J. Compañel.
de Castro, Rosalía (1960). Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar.
de Castro, Rosalía (1989). Obras completas. A Coruña: Hércules.
de Castro, Rosalía (1992). Poesías (Cantares Gallegos, Follas novas, En las orillas del
Sar), 4th ed. Vigo: Patronato Rosalía de Castro.

Secondary
Alonso Nogueira, Alejandro (1999). ‘A invención do escritor nacional. Rosalía de Castro:
a poeta e a súa patria’, in R. Álvarez and D. Vilavedra (eds), Cinguidos por unha arela
común: Homenaxe ó profesor Xesús Alonso Montero. Santiago de Compostela: Univer-
sidade de Santiago de Compostela, pp. 41–64.
Álvarez Ruiz de Ojeda, Victoria (1996). ‘Sobre a “Demisión” de Rosalía’: Unha carta
inédita de Manuel Murguía’, Grial, 131, pp. 189–94.
____ (1997). ‘Un importante documento para a biografía de Rosalía de Castro’, Grial,
136, pp. 479–501.
____ (2000). ‘Rosalía de Castro, actriz: noticias e documentos’, Revista de Estudios
Rosalianos, 1, pp. 201–57.
____ (2008). ‘Sobre “El Codio” (1864), obra perdida de Rosalía de Castro’, Revista de
Estudios Rosalianos, 3, pp. 27–37.
____ (2010). ‘Agna de Valldaura, una amizade catalá de Rosalía de Castro’, Festa da
palabra silenciada, 26, pp. 56–64.
Angueira, Anxo (2013). ‘Rosalía é o gran capital simbólico da Galiza’, Sermos Galiza, 34,
p. 25.
António Souto, Ana et al. (eds) (1985). Rosalía de Castro, unha obra non asumida. San-
tiago de Compostela: Xistral.
Azorín (1930a [1914]). ‘Rosalía de Castro’, in Azorín, Leyendo a los poetas. Zaragoza:
Librería General, pp. 175–80.
____ (1930b [1929]) ‘Silencio’, in Azorín, Leyendo a los poetas. Zaragoza: Librería Ge-
neral, pp. 185–8.
Balaguer, Víctor (1868). Poesías catalanas completas, vol. II. La Bisbal: Est. Tip. Don
Antonio Torres.
Barro, Teresa (1981). Cartas a Rosalía. Sada: Ediciós do Castro.
Blanco Amor, Eduardo (1939). ‘Palabras breves sobre Rosalía’, in R. de Castro, Poemas
galegos. Buenos Aires: Comisión de Homenaje Federación de Sociedades Gallegas,
pp. i–xxii.
Carballo Calero, Ricardo (1979). Estudios rosalianos: Aspectos de vida e obra de Rosalía
de Castro. Vigo: Galaxia.
Castelar, Emilio (1960). ‘Prólogo’, in R. de Castro, Obras completas. Madrid: Aguilar,
pp. 399–413.
192 HELENA MIGUÉLEZ-CARBALLEIRA

Charnon-Deutsch, Lou (2012). ‘Emotional Competency and Reason: Castro’s Exploration

of the Epistemic Shift Bounded’. Paper delivered at ‘A Weapon in the Mud’, Sympo-
sium on Rosalía de Castro, 22 October 2012, University of Santiago de Compostela.
Festa da palabra silenciada (1985). Special issue on Rosalía de Castro. Vigo: FIGA.
González Besada, Augusto (1916). Rosalía Castro. Discursos leídos ante la Real Aca-
demia Española en la Recepción Pública del Excmo. Señor D. Augusto González
Besada, el día 7 de Mayo de 1916. Madrid: Imprenta Clásica Española.
González Fernández, Helena and Rábade Villar, María do Cebreiro (2012). Canon y
subversión: La obra narrativa de Rosalía de Castro. Barcelona: Icaria.
Lamas Carvajal, Valentín (1885). ‘Rosalía de Castro’, O Tío Marcos da Portela, 26 July,
p. 2.
La Voz de Galicia (1970). ‘Isla Couto, condenado a tres meses de arresto mayor’, 25 May
1970, p. 9.
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 ROSALÍA DE CASTRO: LIFE, TEXT AND AFTERLIFE 193

Suggested Reading
Davies, Catherine (1987). Rosalía de Castro no seu tempo. Vigo: Galaxia.
De Castro, Rosalía (2010). The Poetry and Prose of Rosalía de Castro: A Bilingual Fac-
ing Page Edition. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
García Negro, María Pilar (2013). Cantares Gallegos, hoxe: Unha lectura actualizada de
Rosalía de Castro. Santiago de Compostela: Alvarellos.
Moure, Erín (2013). ‘Translator’s Introduction: Open that window, I want to see the sea’,
in R. de Castro, Galician Songs. Sofia, Bulgaria: Small Nations Press, pp. 7–17.
Pardo Amado, Diego (2009). Rosalía de Castro, a luz da ousadía. Ames: Laiovento.
Rábade Villar, María do Cebreiro (2013). ‘Una casa en disputa: Rosalía de Castro entre la
ruina y la restitución’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 47 (1), pp. 29–54.
Rodríguez, Francisco (2011). Rosalía de Castro, estranxeira na súa patria (a persoa e a
obra de onte a hoxe). Galicia: Asociación Socio-Pedagóxica galega.
VV.AA. (1986). Actas do Congreso Internacional de Estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro
e o seu tempo. Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicacións da Universidade de
Santiago de Compostela.