Madrid lacks neither literary history nor reminders of it. Statues of Calderón and Lorca haunt the Plaza Santa Ana, Cervantes offers his profile to passersby from the doorway of his house, and the words of writers and poets such as Francisco de Quevedo are set into the paving stones of the literary quarter.

Less visible are reminders of the female writers, artists and thinkers who emerged in the years before the Spanish civil war only to find themselves silenced or marginalised by Francoism and its monochrome view of women. But, eight decades on, their voices and stories are being heard once more.

Four months ago, Madrid city council unveiled a plaque to Elena Fortún, who was best known as a children’s author until the posthumous publication last year of Hidden Path, a novel about homosexuality that has been compared to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

In March, another plaque will go up on the site of the Lyceum Women’s Club in Madrid, a meeting place for the leading female intellectuals of the age.

Efforts to commemorate the women who flourished during the social emancipation of the Second Republic are being driven by Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, a professor of Hispanic and gender studies at the University of Exeter.

Ernestina de Champourcín moved to Mexico after the Spanish civil war. Photograph: Handout

Capdevila-Argüelles and her film-maker collaborator, Tania Ballo, have so far provided Madrid council with research on 15 women, including the journalist, actor, writer and diplomat Isabel Oyarzábal, the lawyer and politician Victoria Kent and the poet Ernestina de Champourcín.

Her aim is simple: to fill in the gaps in Spain’s social and intellectual history and to honour the flesh-and-blood individuals who became “the ghosts of Spanish modernity” during both the asphyxiating years of the dictatorship and the “pact of forgetting” that followed Franco’s death.



If the Second Republic and even the conflict itself had given many women a chance to learn and get out of the house, the fascist victory forced them into retreat.

“We have a generation of female thinkers – artists, scientists – who go into exile,” said Capdevila-Argüelles.

“And women have to become incredibly modest and flawless, hiding a past that had very often embraced modernity but that couldn’t keep on embracing it. The speech that Pilar Primo de Rivera, the founder of the women’s section of the Falange, gave to Franco after the end of the civil war sums it up: ‘A woman’s peacetime place is in the home.’”

Memorial to Elena Fortún in Madrid. Photograph: Handout

Among those who went into exile was Elena Fortún, whose character Celia – a cross between Just William and Little Women’s Jo March – was a childhood companion for many Spaniards. Fortún eventually returned to Spain, where she died in 1952.

In correspondence with her fellow writer Carmen Laforet, which has just been collected by Capdevila-Argüelles and published as a book, Fortún urges her young colleague to live a better and happier life than she herself did, or could. In Spain, writes Fortún, “time has stood still and that which is not legal is a sin”.

Antonio Maura, a consultant at Madrid city council’s culture department, said that while the tracking down all the information and getting permission to put the plaques on buildings sometimes took time, the council was determined to remember the women who have long been overshadowed by Lorca and his fellow poets of the Generation of 1927.

“People have always talked about and celebrated the poets of the Generation of 1927 but they’ve forgotten that behind – or next to – these writers, there were many women,” he said. “It’s a part of history that has gone unfinished. Maybe it hasn’t been hidden, but it hasn’t been visible enough … What we want to do is retrieve that bit of the story that hasn’t been told.”



In a city not short of monuments to soldiers, philosophers and bullfighters, Capdevila-Argüelles hopes the new plaques will help Spain make a little more sense of its past.

“People, both Spanish and British, have written about Spain’s ghosts, but the most important ghosts are the women – the invisible 50%,” she said.

“The role of history and an awareness of our past is utterly fundamental. It’s about learning about our diversity, our cultural heritage, about learning about our first attempt at genuine democracy at the beginning of the 20th century, which failed. We need to learn from our past; it’s there as a lesson.”