biography
pronunciation:
[kastroh]
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1837–85)
|
| biography:
| Poet and novelist, born in Santiago de Compostela, NW Spain, who wrote in Galician and Castilian. At age 15 she discovered that she was the illegitimate daughter, possibly by a priest, of Doña Teresa de Castro. She left Galicia at 19, publishing in Madrid her first book, La flor (1857). In 1820 she married the Galician art critic and historian Manuel Martínez Murguía, but although she had six children and a secure family life, she was often bored, and recalled in her poems and fiction a lost love from her adolescence who may have been Aurelio Aguirre, the hero in her novel Flavio (1861). In 1863 she published A mi madre in Castilian and Cantares gallegos. Influenced by the ‘baladas’ of Trueba and Ruiz Aguilera, the songs in this latter book are often mistaken for authentic folksongs. Esperanza, the heroine of her novel La hija del mar (1859), a persecuted outcast of unknown parents who finally drowns herself, seems partly autobiographical. The collection of Galician poems Follas novas (1880) was followed by her masterpiece, in Castilian, En las orillas del Sar (1884), in which rhyme largely gives way to assonance. A depressive, she died of cancer, mourned by the whole Galician people. |
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