PARDO BAZAN, EMILIA (1851 —). A naturalistic Spanish novelist and critic. She was born at Corufia, September 16, 1851. After her marriage in 1868, she went to Madrid. where she witnessed the revolution ary outbreak of that year. In 1870 she won a prize offered by the municipality of Oviedo for an essay on the Benedictine monk Benito Je ronimo Feijoo, well known in eighteenth-century Spanish literature'. Essays published soon after wards in the Ciencia. Cristiana showed her an Ultramontane, perhaps a Carlist, but ere long Sxfiora Pardo Baztin underwent a change, in evitable to a follower of naturalism or of nature. A journey through France, England, and Italy followed. Later she settled at Madrid, where she started her critical review, the Nuevo Teatro Critic°. She gained great repute as a leading representative of the naturalistic school of nov eliks, and as one of the most capable of modern literary critics, To some extent she is a disciple of Zola, whose determinism, however, she con demns, although in her two strongest novels, Los pesos dc Ulloa and La m(Irc naturaleze, in which she describes the decay of an aristocratic family, she is close to those very pornographic methods of Zola that she has stigmatized. But she is no mere imitator, for her realism is Span ish rather than French, and she does not limit her pictures of man and nature to the evil side only, but seeks rather a broad outlook on life.
In El cisne dc filamorta the ending is so roman tic as to set at naught her naturalistic theories. Her descriptions of the life in her native Galicia are successful. Of her novels there may be men tioned, besides the three noted above, Pascu-al Un riaje do norios; La tribuna; La (lama fore?,; hzsolacian; Morrina; Una cristiana; La prueba; La piedra angular; and of her essays and critical treatises, San Francisco dc Asis ' • De mi tierra (1888); El Padre Luis Coloma; Pc(iro Antonio de Alarcdn; La rerolueion y la north( en Rusia (1887) ; La cuestidn palpitante (4th ed. 1891), rhetorical essays dealing with realism and naturalism in the modern novel; Potemie«s y estudios literarios, a supplement to the matter contained in the Cucstion palpitante, embracing also the account of her quarrel with the novelist, Pcreda, and a review of some of the works of Gald0s, etc. As a critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan is fairly keen in her analysis, tolerably sure in her judgment, and forceful in her language. Con sult her Obras completes (1891, ff.), and her .Nero Teatro Critico (1891-93).