Caterina Albert i Paradís (1869–1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue “The Infanticide” won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish.
Albert shares with her contemporaries Anton Chekhov and Emilia Pardo Bazán an intense interest in the psychological development of characters and in narrative strategies, and the short stories collected here highlight her range of style and grasp of human nature. Kathleen McNerney’s introduction contextualizes Albert’s themes, feminism, and formal techniques as well as recent Catalan political and literary history.
Born in 1869 to a wealthy family in L’Escala, Spain, Caterina Albert i Paradís took part in many literary movements of her time. She witnessed Spain’s loss of most of its colonial possessions, labor unrest resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and war protests from the early twentieth century through the Spanish Civil War. A writer of great range, she published poetry, essays, short stories, and two novels under the pseudonym Víctor Català.
