Víctor Català (Caterina Albert)

Caterina Albert was a writer of great artistic sensitivity. Her novel Solitude is now over a hundred years old but its relevance remains undiminished. Written under a masculine pseudonym ('Víctor Català') for obvious reasons of the time, this work undoubtedly constitutes the starting-point in modern Catalan literature of the exploration of the female identity by a female writer.

Víctor Català was the pseudonym of the novelist and short-story writer, Caterina Albert (L'Escala, 1869-1966), who also wrote poetry and monologues for the stage. She was the eldest of the four children of the lawyer, politician and rural landowner Lluís Albert and his wife Dolors Paradís. Caterina Albert lived off the rent that came in from the family properties in the town of her birth and, after the deaths of her father and maternal grandmother, she looked after her mother and administered the family estate. She travelled around Europe and lived at different times in Barcelona where, after 1904, she owned a flat. Apart from going to the local primary school and spending one year in a Girona boarding school where she began to study French, she was educated and instructed at home. As for her ideological affinities, the political activities of her father as a Republican politician who had to go into exile for a time after participating in the 1869 federalist uprising of the Empordà region, constitute the basis of her Catalan nationalism, her identification with the Catalan language and her affinity with the doctrines of the nationalist politician Enric Prat de la Riba. Her cultural education and the fulfilment of her artistic leanings were seen to by the family with private classes in drawing, painting and sculpture, activities that she combined with literary creation until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was also within the family that she found an environment that was conducive to her literary "self-learning", for her mother wrote poetry and her grandmother was a great wellspring of knowledge on folklore and popular culture. A further factor that enabled her to write was having her own study where she could enjoy the privacy she needed for working, and she was also a great reader who bought books and reviews every week.

Although she always wanted to appear as an "amateur", defending her creative independence outside of any dogmas and schools, and revealing a certain resistance to appearing in public, she established relationships with the great writers of her time, for example Joan Maragall and Narcís Oller, both close friends whom she deeply admired. She also wrote for a number of periodical publications like Joventut, La Il·lustració Catalana and Feminal. She presided over the 1917 Barcelona literary competition, the Jocs Florals, where she made a speech on De civisme i civilitat (On Civic-mindedness and Civility) and was nominated a member of the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona in 1923, where her inaugural speech was entitled Sensacions d'Empúries (Sensations of Empúries).

Apart from her early literary attempts represented by a number of pieces under the pseudonym of "Virgili Alacseal" that were published in L'Esquella de la Torratxa, Caterina Albert's public literary life began in 1898 when she received prizes in the Olot Jocs Florals for a poem called, "Lo llibre nou" (The New Book) and a monologue for the stage entitled La infanticida (The Child Killer), which, since it was written by a woman, caused a scandal that led her to take refuge thenceforth under the pseudonym of Víctor Català.

Her oeuvre may be grouped into three stages in keeping with the chronology of her publications. The first coincides with the years of Modernism and is the most important period, both for the number of works she wrote and the variety of genres. She published two volumes of poetry El cant dels mesos (Song of the Months, 1901) and Llibre Blanc-Policromi-Tríptic (White-Polychrome-Triptych Book, 1905), a play Quatre monòlegs (Four Monologues, 1901), three collections of short stories, Drames rurals (Rural Dramas, 1902), Ombrívoles (Shades, 1904) and Caires Vius (Sharp Edges, 1907), and a novel, Solitud (Solitude, 1905), which made her famous and was read beyond the borders of Catalonia. Continue reading...