SOURCE: "Translator's Foreward," in The White Horse and Other Stories, Associated University Presses, 1993, pp. 9-13.

In the following excerpt, Fedorchek places Pardo Bazán in the context of some of her contemporaries.

An admired novelist and a respected critic, Emilia Pardo Bazán is also considered, by virtually all scholars and students of Spanish literature, one of nineteenth-century Spain's foremost short story writers. Others (Leopoldo Alas) can be more profound and some (Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and Armando Palacio Valdés) are considerably more gifted with a sense of humor, but few of her Spanish contemporaries have her range and none her volume. The critic Juan Paredes Núñez [in Los cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1979] has been able to locate the staggering number of 580 stories, and states that even this figure is not definitive inasmuch as Pardo Bazán published not only in Spain, but...