The countess Emilia Pardo Bazan was born in 1851 and married at the age of sixteen. But rather than following the usual path of an upper-class woman of the time, she became interested in politics and philosophy, separated from her husband, travelled widely, had an affair with the writer Benito Perez Galdos and started writing herself. The House of Ulloa (1886) is generally considered to be her masterpiece. She died in 1921.
