Alfonsina Storni

Storni worked as a factory hand, a travelling actress and a rural schoolteacher, and at nineteen went to Buenos Aires alone and pregnant, which in 1912 meant losing every respectable door. She kept the child, took office work, and published verse that was direct about desire and openly angry at what men were permitted and women were not — the poem Tú me quieres blanca throws a lover's demand for purity back at him line by line. She became the first woman admitted to the city's literary circles on equal terms, and paid for it in ridicule.

Her later poetry left the confessional manner behind and grew spare and strange. In 1935 she had a mastectomy for breast cancer; three years later the disease returned, two close friends died, and on the night of 24 October 1938 she posted a final poem to a newspaper and walked into the sea at Mar del Plata. Her body was found the next morning. The song Alfonsina y el mar, written thirty years later, is sung across the Spanish-speaking world by people who could not name a line of her verse. She is buried in La Chacarita in Buenos Aires.