SOURCE: "Society, Legend and the Poet," in Rosalía de Castro and the Galician Revival, Tamesis Books Limited, 1986, pp. 17-35.

In the following excerpt, Stevens surveys Castro's life and criticism of her work, and discusses Castro's association with the nineteenth-century Galician Revival in Spanish literature.

1. Biography

Rosalía de Castro was born in Santiago de Compostela on February 24, 1837. She was the illegitimate daughter of María Teresa da Cruz de Castro e Abadía, the descendant of a noble family that had seen better days.¹ Almost nothing is known of Castro's father, José Martínez Viojo, except that he was a priest and native of Ortoño and was born in 1798. According to birth records she was not sent to the orphanage connected with the Hospital Real where she was born. But the confusion about who cared for the child during the first years of her life has...