Emilia Pardo Bazán and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: A Literary and Personal Friendship

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Notes

¹The National Library of Scotland, Manuscript Division, Cunninghame Graham Collection, Inventory Acc 11335, Item 135: Letters c.1890–1898 to Gabrielle Cunninghame Graham from her friend Emilia de [sic] Prado [sic] Bazán. The earliest datable letters written by Pardo Bazán are from 1890, while the last bears the date 1898. I am grateful to the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote from the letters.

²Maurice Hemingway, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán, Luis Vidart and Other Friends: Eight Unpublished Letters and Two Cards’, Anales Galdosianos, 21 (1986), 263–73 (p. 263).

³Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá, ‘El epistolario de Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, estado de la cuestión’, in Emilia Pardo Bazán: estado de la cuestión, ed. José Manuel González Herrán, et al. (A Coruña: Casa-Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán/Fundación Caixa Galicia, 2005), 181–217 (pp. 196–98, 185–86).

⁴Carmen Bravo-Villasante, Vida y obra de Emilia Pardo Bazán (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962).

⁵Anne Taylor, The People's Laird: A Life of Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (Easingwold, York: Tobias Press, 2005), 87.

⁶Taylor, The People's Laird, 85, 240.

⁷Taylor, The People's Laird, 105. Taylor was the first to check the Scottish Records Office for Cunninghame Graham's will (109 n. 55). She died on 22 January 1906; Pardo Bazán died in 1921.

⁸Taylor, The People's Laird, 87.

⁹A. F. Tschiffely, Don Roberto: Being the Account of the Life and Works of R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 1852–1936 (London: William Heinemann, 1937), 138. If she was a convent girl, the obvious question is, what she was doing alone in a Parisian park when Robert, on horseback, met her?

¹⁰Jean Cunninghame Graham, Gaucho Laird: The Life of R. B. ‘Don Roberto’ Cunninghame Graham (Glasgow, KY: The Long Riders’ Guild, 2004), 190–91.

¹¹Jad Adams, ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham: Deception and Achievement in the 1890s’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 50:3 (2007), 251–68 (p. 254).

¹²Taylor, The People's Laird, 85.

¹³Adams, ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham’, 256. Tschiffely, Don Roberto, 344.

¹⁴Taylor's book presents a number of startling, unsubstantiated hypotheses, including that Gabrielle's younger sister Grace, born in 1875 when Gabrielle was just over seventeen, was not in fact ‘Caroline/Gabrielle's much younger sister but her illegitimate daughter, conceived on the first occasion Caroline bolted’ (Taylor, The People's Laird, 92).

¹⁵Cedric Watts and Laurence Davies, Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1979); and Alexander Maitland, Robert and Gabriela Cunninghame Graham (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1983).

¹⁶Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa, Being Some Account of her Life and Times Together with Some Pages from the History of the Last Great Reform in the Religious Orders, 2^nd ed. (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907 [1^st ed. 1894]).

¹⁷Taylor, The People's Laird, 242.

¹⁸Taylor contends that in Robert's sketch, ‘One Hundred in the Shade’, which she takes to be largely autobiographical, he depicts what attracted Gabriela to Catholicism: ‘the Mass with all there is about it, light, incense, and the tradition of antiquity, appealed to her on the aesthetic side’ (The People's Laird, 102).

¹⁹Tschiffely, Don Roberto, 269. Adams identifies smoking as ‘a characteristic of the New Woman’ (Adams, ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham’, 259).

²⁰Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá, ‘Amistades literarias: doce cartas de Emilia Pardo Bazán a Isaac Pavlosvky [sic]’, La Tribuna: Cadernos de Estudos da Casa Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1 (2003), 97–147 (p. 132).

²¹Thion, ‘Amistades literarias’, 135. In a previous letter from La Coruña, dated 18 April 1886, Emilia confesses to Pavlovsky: ‘Falta me hace que V. venga, para fumar un par de azucarillos [tabaco]: aquí la sola idea de que yo acerque a mis labios ese confite, produce estremecimientos de horror, sobre todo en mamá’ (Thion, ‘Amistades literarias’, 130).

²²Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, Novel Review, 34 (March 1892), 311–23 (pp. 312, 323). Hereafter ‘Cunninghame Graham’ refers to Gabriela.

²³I have assigned numbers to the collection of twenty-six previously unnumbered and arbitrarily ordered letters in my closest approximation to their chronological order. I cite the letters by number in parentheses in the text.

²⁴Taylor, The People's Laird, 239.

²⁵ La Correspondencia de España reports on 24 March 1890 that Pardo Bazán left Madrid the night before last for La Coruña (p. 1).

²⁶Taylor records that Gabriela gave a lecture on Spain at Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1890: ‘She began with a description of Vigo’ (The People's Laird, 104). The British Library Integrated Catalogue lists Gabriela Cunninghame Graham's thirty-page Spain: A Lecture (London: Modern Press, 1890).

²⁷Cunninghame Graham, Spain, 24.

²⁸Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, ‘España’, La España Moderna, 1:20 (August 1890), 72–106.

²⁹Robert teasingly called Gabriela ‘the lady of the Manor’ or ‘the countess of Chideock’, the name of a village they visited in Dorset; ‘Chid’ became her life-long nickname (Jean Cunninghame Graham, Gaucho Laird, 207).

³⁰Pardo Bazán describes Madrid's heat in the same terms in a letter to Luis Vidart dated 22 September 1896 (Hemingway, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 269).

³¹Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 108–09. See also Watts and Davies, Cunninghame Graham, 108–09.

³²Jane Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2002), 30.

³³Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 32. Susan Stanley Holton, ‘Now You See It Now You Don't: The Women's Franchise League and Its Place in Contending Narratives of the Women's Suffrage Movement’, in The Women's Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, ed. Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1998), 15–36 (p. 15).

³⁴Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 31.

³⁵Holton, ‘Now You See It’, 17; Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 32–33.

³⁶Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 37.

³⁷Holton, ‘Now You See It’, 25.

³⁸Without providing corroborating documentation, Taylor asserts that Gabriela ‘was a member of the Council of the Women's League in England’, and that she ‘was commissioned to offer Pardo Bazán honorary membership. At this first encounter she may also have suggested the article ‘Women in Spain’ which appeared in the Fortnightly Review the following year. Having met her, Gabrielle told Robert she felt she had made a friend’ (Taylor, The People's Laird, 240).

³⁹Minutes book, Women's Franchise League, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

⁴⁰Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 124.

⁴¹Taylor, The People's Laird, 229–30. See also Watts and Davies, Cunninghame Graham, 122.

⁴²Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 121 (letters dated 17 June 1891 and 27 June 1891).

⁴³Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 122.

⁴⁴Taylor interprets Emilia's letters of ‘various dates’ to mean that ‘she submitted to her house being used by Gabrielle as a repository for the antiques—furniture, pictures, carpets—which she picked up cheaply in far flung parts of Spain with the intention of selling them at a profit when she got them back to England’ (Taylor, The People's Laird, 240–41).

⁴⁵Ramón León Máinez, Teresa de Jesús ante la crítica (Madrid: A. J. Alaria, 1880).

⁴⁶‘El destripador de antaño’, La España Moderna, 1:13 (January 1890), 5–35.

⁴⁷Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘Minia’, trans. Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Novel Review, Nos. 33, 34, new series 1:1 (February–April 1892), 228–35, 301–10, 11–20.

⁴⁸Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘Travesura pontificia’, La España Moderna, 1:15 (March 1890), 5–13.

⁴⁹Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘A Pontifical Fancy’, in ‘Some Spanish Reviews’, The Review of Reviews, 1:4 (1890), 328.

⁵⁰Hemingway, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 268.

⁵¹‘De todas partes’, El Heraldo de Madrid, 23 November 1890, p. 1.

⁵²Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 313.

⁵³Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 118.

⁵⁴Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 122 (letters of 8 July 1891 and 15 July 1891).

⁵⁵Lætitia Marie Wyse Bonaparte (1833–1902), a descendent of the Emperor's brother Lucien, acquired the title Princess in her first marriage, becoming Princess Rattazzi with her second marriage. Her third husband was a Spaniard, Luis Rute. She was an author, magazine editor and society hostess. News of the forthcoming marriage even appeared in New York: ‘General Gossip: News of Authors and Writers’, Current Literature (November 1890), 330, copied from the New York Sunday World.

⁵⁶Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 320.

⁵⁷Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 318.

⁵⁸Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 321.

⁵⁹Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 120.

⁶⁰Adams, ‘Gabriela Cunninghame Graham’, 258.

⁶¹Taylor, The People's Laird, 210, 226 n. 5 (Gabrielle Cunninghame Graham diary 21 and 23 December 1888).

⁶⁴Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 322.

⁶²Tschiffely, Don Roberto, 240.

⁶³For unknown reasons, a pencilled handwriting that also annotates some of the other letters has scrawled ‘Carta de la Puta’ at the top of this one (#13). Someone, at an unknown date, picked up on—or imagined—a serious slight perceived by Gabriela or a wounding disagreement between the two women.

⁶⁵Emilia Pardo Bazán, Memorias de un solterón, ed. María Ángeles Ayala (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004 [1^st ed. 1896], 225.

⁶⁶Pardo Bazán had the right to claim her father's pontifical title following his death in 1890, when her mother became the Condesa viuda de Pardo Bazán. The countess’ crown represents a discreet display of that title.

⁶⁷Nelly Clèmessy specifies that La piedra angular was ‘escrita en 1891 en los primeros meses del año y publicada en sus últimos días’ (Emilia Pardo Bazán como novelista [de la teoría a la práctica], trad. Irene Gambra, 2 vols [Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1982], I, 247).

⁶⁸‘Índice de libros recibidos’, Nuevo Teatro Crítico, I:8 (August 1891), 94–95.

⁶⁹Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘Por la España vieja’: ‘Tordesillas’, ‘Villalar y sus campos’, and ‘El Castillo de Simancas’, El Imparcial, 2 August 1891, 24 August 1891, 2 November 1891. Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘Por la España vieja: Los Santos de Valladolid’, Nuevo Teatro Crítico, I:10 (October 1891), 69–83; and ‘Medina de Ríoseco’, Nuevo Teatro Crítico I:12 (December 1891), 18–32.

⁷⁰‘La señora Pardo Bazán en el Ateneo’, La Época, 5 April 1892, p. 4.

⁷¹‘Sección de noticias’, El Imparcial, 25 January 1892, p. 2.

⁷²Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘La sed de Cristo’, El Imparcial, 12 April 1895, p. 2.

⁷³‘Y va de cuento’, El Siglo Futuro, 15 April 1895, pp. 1–2 (p. 2).

⁷⁴‘Á L. P. de Vd.’, La Correspondencia de España, 20 April 1895, p. 1.

⁷⁵Juan Paredes Núñez, ‘Notas explicativas’, in Emilia Pardo Bazán. Cuentos (selección), ed. Juan Paredes Núñez (Madrid: Taurus, 1984), 266, n. 155.

⁷⁶ Índices de materias y autores de ‘La España Moderna’: tomos 1 a 261 [1889–1910], ed. Román Gómez Villafranca (Madrid: La España Moderna, 1910), 255.

⁷⁷Darío Villanueva and José Manuel González Herrán, ‘Introducción’, in Emilia Pardo Bazán, Obras completas, ed. Darío Villanueva and José Manuel González Herrán, Biblioteca Castro, 6 vols (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2002), VI, Novelas cortas, ix–xxvii (p. xxiv). Julia Biggane affirms that the three novellas were published together ‘under the title Novelas ejemplares in 1896 [sic]’, giving the citation ‘Madrid: Administración de las Obras de Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1895’ (In a Liminal Space: The Novellas of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Durham Modern Language Series [Durham: Univ. of Durham, 2000], 12, 30 n. 9). The British Library Integrated Catalogue gives the date 1895 for Novelas ejemplares, Vol. 13, Obras completas de Emilia Pardo Bazán.

⁷⁸Gabriela's description is intended to shock her mother-in-law, Anne Bontine, and contrast Gabriela's lifestyle with that provided to Anne and other Gartmore dependents by income from the estate: ‘We live here in a way that you would scarcely believe and as no two people in our position would live. […] My husband and I never leave home together; it is years since we have done so. When one is away the other remains to attend to the business’ (Taylor, The People's Laird, 233, 247 n. 11 [letter from Gabriela to Anne Elizabeth Bontine, 6 April 1893]).

⁷⁹Jean Cunninghame Graham, Gaucho Laird, 344.

⁸⁰Taylor, The People's Laird, 243.

⁸¹Jean Cunninghame Graham, Gaucho Laird, 346.

⁸²Maitland, Robert and Gabriela, 148.

⁸³Taylor, The People's Laird, 242.

⁸⁴Taylor, The People's Laird, 243.

⁸⁵Cunninghame Graham, ‘The Best Scenery I Know’, The Saturday Review, 84:2184 (4 September 1897), pp. 256–57.

⁸⁶Cunninghame Graham, ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 313.

⁸⁷ Correspondencia de Madrid, 3 February 1894, in Veinticuatro diarios (Madrid, 1830–1900), ed. Seminario de Bibliografía Hispánica (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1972), Vol. III: L–P, 467. Hemingway identifies a newspaper article that includes the names of those who attended Pardo Bazán's ‘party to celebrate the installation of electric lighting in her house’ (‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’, 262). I cannot verify the citation.

⁸⁸This article contributes to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas’ research project FFI2010-17273, ‘La Re(d)pública de las Letras: redes de sociabilidad y asociacionismo femenino en el campo cultural contemporáneo (1834–1931)’.