11
Letter, 16 June 1886, Epistolario, p. 272. See also unpublished letter, 10 Dec. 1884. In turn Valera introduces Gimeno when she gives her first lecture before the Ateneo de Madrid in June 1890; Teodoro Guerrero, «Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer», El Álbum Ibero Americano, 2nd series. No. 36 (30 Nov. 1890): 190-91.
12
Since I completed this article, Carmen Simón Palmer has located a biographical sketch of Gimeno from 1899 that gives her date of birth as 11 December 1850. If this date is correct, Gimeno recognizes as early as 1877 the incompatibility of her age, then 26, with her status as an unmarried woman writer. In contrast, Pardo Bazán in 1891 postpones entering her fifth decade by three years; see «Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán: apuntes biográficos», La Ilustración Artística, No. 476 (9 Feb. 1891): 84.
13
Unión Ibero-Americana, 21, No. 3 (March 1907): 10-11.
14
Unión Ibero-Americana, 25, No. 6 (June 1911): 21-22; and Viriato Díaz-Pérez, Ensayos II (Palma de Mallorca: Luis Ripoll Editor, 1988), p. 59. I am grateful to Noël M. Valis for sending me a copy of Díaz-Pérez's article.
15
El Argos, 1, No. 25 (30 Sept. 1871): 4.
16
I find no trace of «Maura y Sofía», listed by Gimeno in 1908 among her publications, or «Elina Durval» (1878), cited by Ossorio y Bernard presumably from information supplied him by Gimeno. The latter may be a translation or adaptation.
17
After Emilia Pardo Bazán first opens the doors of this male bastion to lectures by women in 1887, Gimeno is the second woman to lecture there. By 1908 she has given five lectures at the Ateneo.
18
«Suceso teatral. La huelga de hijos», El Álbum Ibero Americano, 2nd series, 2 (22 Nov. 1893): 220-21. See also my article, «The Modern Woman on the Spanish Stage: The Contributions of Gaspar and Dicenta», Estreno, 7, No. 2 (Fall 1982); 25-28.
19
I find no mention of children from Gimeno's marriage, but the defense of motherhood is strong among all women writers and constitutes a central convention of sentimental fiction. Unmarried or childless writers may intensify the exaltation of motherhood to erase their difference as childless women.
20
Is Gimeno's underscoring of él and ella a conscious echo of George Sand's Elle et lui or a reply to the Hartzenbusch poem «Ellas y ellos» that Cueto appends to his «Carta-Prólogo»?