Maria Aurèlia Capmany

Educated in some years of "normality" and imbued with republican ideas, Maria Aurèlia Capmany (Barcelona, 1918-1991) did not have an easy time becoming a writer in the Catalonia of the years that followed the Civil War. Her literary beginnings were marked by the straitjacket of censorship and the pettiness of the Catalan cultural world under the repressive Franco regime, circumstances shared by her whole generation. Hence, several writers – Manuel de Pedrolo, Jordi Sarsanedas, Joan Perucho, Josep Maria Espinàs and Maria Aurèlia Capmany herself – even though they had already started to publish some works, opted to make themselves known through a jointly-authored book, Cita de narradors [Rendezvous of Narrators] (Selecta, 1958), which was awarded the Josep Yxart Essay Prize. In this book they analysed, linking one entry with the next, each of their literary careers.

After the 1960s, Maria Aurèlia Capmany devoted herself exclusively to the world of culture and literature, working in several genres, until she became an indisputable intellectual reference in Catalonia in the second half of the twentieth century. Iconoclastic, rebelling against the destiny that the norms had decreed was hers, she eventually came to be a public figure and, in particular, at a time in which the term "public figure", if used in the feminine form, virtually had only the negative connotations of whore, a public woman, which is precisely what she stood up for. Committed to the struggle for different freedoms, she took an active part in anti-Franco activities as a socialist and Catalan nationalist militant, first clandestinely and subsequently in official positions. Neither did she acquiesce in the role assigned to women by the Franco regime and was a pioneer in Catalonia, through her essays, in introducing modern feminism of which she was a staunch defender.

Heir of realism and influenced by existentialism, Maria Aurèlia Capmany had no wish to defer to the dictates of any literary mandarins in her own creative work. Heterodox, a booklover, a woman of great vitality and passion, instead of keeping quiet, which is what females of her times were supposed to do, she expressed herself loud and clear with impudent lucidity that clearly bothered many coteries of Catalan culture. This also explains why, when 2011 will see the twentieth anniversary of her death, Maria Aurèlia Capmany is still, for these sectors, an "uncomfortable" figure and this is a situation that engenders amnesias and cultivates oblivion. Guillem-Jordi Graells, the leading scholar of her work and editor of Obra completa de Capmany [Complete Works of Capmany], has always left no room for doubt in his denunciation of this neglect and offers a very precise summary of her legacy: the diversity of her literary endeavours, her taste for controversy, her public personality on several fronts of the struggle, her accommodation to all sorts of channels for conveying ideas and her importance as an intellectual in Catalan culture after the Civil War, after the victory of Franco, which marked her so much.

The Early Works, Existentialism and Identity Crises
Maria Aurèlia Capmany was born in Barcelona on 3 August 1918. Granddaughter of the federalist lawyer and writer Sebastià Farnés (1854-1934) and daughter of the folklorist and writer Aureli Capmany (1868-1954), she grew up in a liberal, intellectual, left-leaning, Catalan-nationalist family, a background to which one must add her secondary schooling at the Institut Escola, a centre of educational renovation established by the Republican Generalitat (Catalan Government) that was to leave a permanent imprint on her. The spirit of freedom in which she was educated, however, came to an end with the defeat of 1939. With a degree in Philosophy, she began her literary career in the 1940s while simultaneously teaching philosophy and language. Continue reading...