Rosalía de Castro

Rosalía de Castro (born February 1837, Santiago de Compostela, Spain—died July 15, 1885, Padrón, near Santiago) was the most outstanding modern writer in the Galician language, whose work is of both regional and universal significance.

In 1858 Castro married the historian Manuel Murguía (1833–1923), a champion of the Galician Renaissance. Although she was the author of a number of novels, she is best known for her poetry, contained in Cantares gallegos (1863; “Galician Songs”) and Follas novas (1880; “New Medleys”), both written in her own language, and En las orillas del Sar (1884; Beside the River Sar), written in Castilian. Part of her work (the Cantares and some of the poems in Follas novas) expresses with sympathetic power the spirit of the Galician people—their gaiety, their wisdom and folklore, their resentment of Castilian domination, their love of their homeland, and the sorrows of poverty and emigration. About 1867, however, Castro began to write more personally, describing in verse her own deepest feelings—remorse, repressed desire, the anguish of living, the desolation of spiritual loneliness, fear of death, the transience of affection, the feeling that everything is in vain. Her complete works appeared in 1973.