Ángeles Caso fuses literary genres and gives us an exciting, vindicating and profoundly rigorous work about the heroines who dared to raise their voices and hold their heads high. This book illuminates the lives of just some of these women, in order to illuminate those of others.
Almost two decades ago, Ángeles Caso began a unique project with Las olvidadas, a work in which he reconstructed a female cultural genealogy made up of all the women who broke away from what society tried to impose on them, and dared to live against the tide; women who dared to create and think about a better world, even if all they received in return was the scorn of critics and the canon.
Las desheredadas takes us to the 18th and 19th centuries, crucial periods in the history of the West, and the seed of the era in which we live today. It’s the time of painters such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard; of the learned Lady Mary Montagu and the Duchess of Osuna; of scientists such as the Marquess de Châtelet and Ada Lovelace; of betrayed revolutionaries such as Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft; of writers such as Mary Shelley, the Brontës and Emilia Pardo Bazán; of early feminists such as Flora Tristan, Concepción Arenal and Rosario de Acuña; of impressionists such as Berthe Morisot and Camille Claudel… These women dedicated themselves to the arts and to thought, and they fought for the freedom and rights of the most disadvantaged. Despite all this, the enlightened and liberal bourgeoisie ended up writing the official story. And there was no place for these women in it. This exclusion gave rise to feminism, which then began its unstoppable journey.
