THE TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE SPANISH NOVEL IN THE FIRST THIRD OF THE 19TH CENTURY: THE HISTORICAL, SENTIMENTAL AND GOTHIC ELEMENTS

Though women writing was presenting in the England of the first third of century xix a considerable development and a maturity, the certain thing is that the list of British novelists whose works arrive at that same time at our country is limited enough. All these texts translated into Spanish in the same dates, the second and the third decades of the century are framed inside popular genres, with great presence of didactism and sentimentalism, elements derived from the adventures of the heroic narrative and ingredients of Gothic romances. This paper focuses in the scarce translations from English women's novels presenting elements and narrative techniques characteristic of Gothic tales, a genre very inusual in Spain at the beginning os xtxth century, specifically the works of Sophia Lee, Regina Maria Roche and Ann Radcliffe. Its presence in the Spanish literary panorama of the first third of xixth. Century reveals the publishing demands of a new public, more and more bourgeois and feminine, eager to consume the readings that entertained the European middle-class of his time and to have access to women writing, as much in the didactic and sentimental field like in the Gothic novel.