«María Luisa Villalba» and La Tarde

Abstract

The present work focuses on the first steps of María Rosa Alonso as journalist, specifically her collaboration with the newspaper La Tarde. At that time, she was only twenty years old and she dared to write articles under the pseudonym «María Luisa Villalba». At the beginning of the 20th century it was frowned upon for a woman to write in the journals, and in order to avoid problems, principally with her mother, she decided to silence her true identity. Later this work deals with the young writer in the historical context of the first decades of the xxth century, with a comparison with María Joaquina de Viera y Clavijo, a woman who during the Enlightment also carried out works that, at the time, were unexpected for the feminine condition. Her life shares several similarities with the journalist. We focus on the newspaper La Tarde, its history and how the trust that Víctor Zurita, director of that evening journal, placed in the young scholar was decisive for the beginning of a fruitful professional relationship. We present a thematic classification of her articles, in which we include a brief abstract with some personal assessments, always following the chronological order.