Between Conformity and Transgression: Approaches to Writing in the Albums of Emilia Pardo Bazán

This chapter analyzes two albums belonging to Emilia Pardo Bazán and proposes that her involvement in this nineteenth-century trend transgressed prescribed gendered dynamics. Housed at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano library and the Biblioteca Nacional de España, neither of these two albums constitutes a typical model of this social custom. The chapter demonstrates that Pardo Bazán’s interventions in this practice are a manifestation of her intention to disrupt traditions and of her defiance of stereotypical gender roles. Further, Pardo Bazán’s participation in the album craze shows her ambivalence between the popular and the intellectual, considering what it meant for her identity as a writer and for her conception of cultural constructions of the feminine in the nineteenth century.