Blanca de los Ríos Nostench (15 August 1859 – 13 April 1956) was a Spanish writer and painter.
Life and work
Blanca de los Ríos Nostench was an outstanding writer and literary critic, although she remains an obscure figure despite her intense and fruitful efforts. Her work has been translated into almost all European languages. Her birth into a cultured family brought her a broad education, as Consuelo Flecha points out in her 2000 biography of the author: "Surrounded by a family environment of writers, politicians, artists, and doctors, her education benefited from the wealth of stimuli and possibilities that this cultural context provided her with: her father, , architect; her maternal grandfather, doctor; her uncles, writers like José Amador de los Ríos; and politicians, were a reference which she knew how to intelligently call on, even though she knew that, as a woman, not all roads were equally easy for her."
She married (1861–1923), a well-known architect and archaeologist from Madrid and professor at the Madrid School of Architecture who made restorations and reforms of monuments such as the cathedrals of Cuenca and Burgos, and published important studies on the history of architecture. The move to the capital granted the author direct contact with its literary and intellectual environment and extended her horizons and plans.
Perhaps because of this awareness of the difficulties of being a woman, she hid her identity in her first works for the press, which were published under the name Carolina del Boss, an anagram of her own, although she quickly abandoned this pseudonym to sign as Blanca de los Ríos. A precocious writer, her first novel Margarita was published in 1878, when she was only 16, followed by the poetry collections Los funerales del César (1880), Esperanzas y recuerdos (1881; expanded in 1912), El romancero de Don Jaime El Conquistador, and La novia del marinero (1886). A little later came her novels Melita palma (1901), Sangre española (1902), and La niña Sanabria (1907). During these years she published numerous short stories such as "Las hijas de don Juan", "Madrid goyesco", and "Los diablos azules", and story collections such as La Rondeña (Andalusian tales) and El Salvador (various stories) in 1902, and El tesoro de Sorbas in 1914.
She wrote for periodicals such as , , , El Correo de la Moda, , La Ilustración Española y Americana, Blanco y Negro, La Enseñanza Moderna, , and especially , a magazine that she founded and directed from 1918 to its closure in 1930. In this, as in other publications, she conveyed her feminist ideas.
She was a friend of Emilia Pardo Bazán, who had a very good opinion of her as a writer.
She participated as a collaborator in the writing of the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana.
The concern for women and relations between Spain and Latin America were always present in her thoughts, reflected by her participation in various associations and events such as the Americanist Assembly of Barcelona, the Cádiz and Madrid Centers of Hispano-American Culture, the Superior Board of Charity of Madrid, and the Union of Spanish Ladies, in which she advocated for progress in protective measures for women at work. She belonged to the Ateneo de Madrid and was part of the Asamblea Nacional Consultiva from 1927 to 1929 during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.
The field in which she was most distinguished, and in which she left the greatest literary legacy, was undoubtedly the study and criticism of literature, in which she took Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo as her teacher, following the rules of historical research and criticism that he proposed. One of her principal works is Del siglo de Oro, published in 1910, for which Menéndez Pelayo himself wrote the prologue, in which he said of her: "The illustrious lady author of this book does not need anyone to present her to the reader with informal commendations. They would always be inferior to her proven merits and to the just notoriety that she enjoys as an artist of noble lyrical and narrative ingenuity."