Pervivència i memòria de Maria Josepa Massanés: la creació d’una imatge

Abstract

This article analyses the various paths that, over the decades between her death and the Second Spanish Republic, led to Josepa Massanés (1811–1887) enjoying a posthumous fame uncommon among nineteenth-century women writers, thanks in no small part to Massanés’s own efforts to construct and preserve her own legacy. Examination of the evolution in interpretations and, most importantly, assessments made by different intellectuals over this period produces a complex and multifaceted vision of her significance as a writer in Spanish and Catalan: from the first of the 19th-century Spanish women poets to a core figure in the Renaixença and even a feminist pioneer. Among these, it is, above all, Dolors Monserdà who will be seen to have worked the hardest to keep Massanés’s memory alive, modifying the picture she painted of the writer to suit changing times.