Las olvidadas

The Forgotten | Planeta, 2005


Ángeles Caso traces the lives of all these women creators, highlights the permanent hostility towards the female culture in which they lived and thus builds a genealogy of exceptional women who preceded the creators of today's world over the centuries.

«I assure you that someone will remember us in the future. It took almost three thousand years for Sappho's words to her fellow women poets to become a reality. In the meantime, generations and generations of women have been confined to silence, ignorance and submission to male power. However, many escaped the norms and tried to develop their intelligence and talent, managing to communicate through their own works. Creative and wise women, writers, artists and composers who rebelled against the prevailing order and had to live with doubts, fears and persecutions.

Some of them achieved the recognition of their contemporaries, such as Hildegard of Bingen, advisor to popes and emperors, Christina de Pisan, chronicler of the history of France, Beatrice Galindo, Latin tutor to Isabella the Catholic, Sofonisba Anguissola, portrait painter at the court of Philip II, María de Zayas, successful novelist in the Golden Age, Aphra Behn, playwright and spy in Restoration England, and Luisa Ignacia Roldán, chamber sculptor to Charles II and Philip V. But history erased them from its indexes, putting them back in the silence from which they had tried to flee.»