Emilia Pardo Bazan, Cuentos

The Geopolitics of Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La Quimera: Femme Fatale as Split Feminist Subject

“…Pattison (1971) observes that Pardo Bazán appears in the work in two ways-as Christian woman Minia and in that "the artistic conversion of Silvio Lago from strict naturalism to an idealistic, religious realism is the history of Doña Emilia's own development" (p. 87). Gonzáles-Arias also comments that Silvio's proceeding from costumbrismo to spiritualism represents the "author's own trajectory from early naturalistic and regionalist concerns to the treatment in her last novels of the themes of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century literary currents-Decadentism, Symbolism and Modernism" (p. 150).…”

“…Many critics, such as Mariano López (1979), Walter T. Pattison (1971) and Francisca González-Arias (1992), see La Quimera as Pardo Bazán's most important work of fiction. Eduardo Gómez de Baquero (1926), describes it as "la más perfecta de sus novelas como composición artística y como riqueza de elementos" (p. 156).…”