Isabel de Villamartín Thomàs (A Guarda [O Baixo Miño-Galícia], 1837 - La Garriga [Vallès Oriental-Catalunya], 1877) was a poet, fiction writer, and playwright.

At an early age, she moved with her mother to Catalonia where, as a young woman, she came to know writers from Girona and Barcelona who moved in Renaixença (an early 19th-century romantic revivalist movement in Catalan language and culture) circles. Her most important patron and defender was Víctor Balaguer.

After the Jocs Florals literary competition was revived, she was awarded the most prestigious prize (Flor Natural) for her poem “Clemència Isaura”. In 1861 she received the “Viola d’or i plata” Prize for the poem “Creu de Cristo”.

She published her work in several Catalan poetry anthologies, among them Los trobadors nous (1858), Los trovadors moderns (1859), El libro del obrero (1862), and Calendari català (1864), as well as writing in Catalan and Spanish in Catalan publications like El conceller, La Floresta, La Primavera, and El Café.

In Spanish, she published the poetry collections Pembé-Haré (1856) and Horas crepusculares (1865), and also the play Un dia de lágrimas (1859). In 1871 she started writing for the Madrid-based magazine El Correo de la Moda. From her conservative feminist standpoint, her work oscillates between a certain melancholy and intense Catholicism..


Web page: Francesc Viñas for AELC
Front page image: Painting of Clémence Isaure by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (from the book by Pierre-Louis Boyer, Clémence Isaure, Biarritz: Atlantica, 2010)
Translation: Julie Wark