Rosalía de Castro

Castro was born in Santiago to an unmarried mother and a priest, and registered as of unknown parents. In 1863 she published Cantares gallegos, the first substantial book of poetry in Galician since the Middle Ages, in a country where the language was spoken by nearly everyone in Galicia and treated as the mark of a peasant. The date it appeared, 17 May, is now the Galician literature holiday.

Her subject was emigration: the men gone to Cuba and Argentina, the villages left to women, and what she called the widows of the living. Follas novas, of 1880, is bleaker and stranger. Her last book, En las orillas del Sar, was in Spanish and is formally the most inventive thing she wrote. She had five surviving children, chronic illness and almost no money, and asked before dying of uterine cancer at forty-eight that her unpublished manuscripts be burned; her family did it. In 1891 her remains were moved to the Pantheon of Illustrious Galicians in Santiago, where she is the reason most visitors come.