SOURCE: “Woman and the Twentieth-Century Spanish Literary Canon: The Lady Vanishes,” in Anales de la Literatura Espanola Conteporanea, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1992, pp. 301-24.

In the following essay, Bieder examines some reasons for the shrinking role of women, as both authors and protagonists, in the twentieth-century Spanish literary canon.

To observe that female protagonists and women authors are strikingly absent from the canon of Spanish fiction in the first third of the twentieth century is to state the obvious. Nevertheless, the shift away from the nineteenth-century feminocentric novel and the concurrent disappearance of women authors have received surprisingly little attention from critics and historians of Spanish literature. Even the most comprehensive formulation of the twentieth-century canon includes no women's names and no novels that center on female characters in the decades that separate Emilia Pardo Bazán from Carmen Laforet. My inquiry into this vanishing act will follow two different...