Historias de vida y vidas para la historia. Mujeres de la cultura hispánica vistas por escritoras del exilio republicano de 1939

Promoted by Ortega y Gasset at the end of the 1920s, the objective of Spain joining the surge of biographies that was appearing in interwar Europe was truncated in 1936 with the outbreak of the Civil War. When it ended, cultivation of the biography genre – mediated by the official discourse of Franco’s Spain – became a lifesaving source of income for the exiles which often had no other option but to write the biographies commissioned to them by the publishing houses where they worked. The diversity of Spanish and international personalities from all periods, whose life stories were told during the long period of exile, is therefore very great. But unlike their male counterparts, women writers tended to focus on a small number of women, chosen for having lived in the shadow of the influential men alongside whom they lived, for having fought indefatigably for freedom and social rights or for having persevered against all the odds, in their ambition to write. María Teresa León, Clara Campoamor, Luisa Carnés, Emilia Elías and Cecilia G. de Guilarte are some of the women writers advocated by the women selected to write their stories, women in whom they recognised some of the traits of their own identities and who, as will be seen in the pages of this article, they aimed to turn into legendary female figures of Republican Spain, figures like Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado had been right from the start and also for the entire exiled community.