ABSTRACT
It was only natural that a marginalized, female contemporary of the so-called Generation of 1898—Carmen de Burgos, Colombine—carry on a spirited dialogue with its otherwise mostly male members, whose social convictions and esthetic practices often differed from her own. Pío Baroja and Miguel de Unamuno were two of the noventayochistas [intellectuals of 1898] with whom Burgos carried on this dialogue, more in her fiction—where she could surreptitiously encode her differing perspectives—than in her newspaper articles or longer essays, where the resulting open polemics might work to her disadvantage as an already high-profile feminist. Burgos's novel La rampa/The Ramp occupies an enviable, though perhaps not unique, position in Spanish narrative of the first decades of the twentieth century. With a certain consistency, Burgos used narrative situations created by Unamuno and recycled by him in his best-known works, changing the personalities involved and her own analyses in accord with her personal intuitions of verisimilitude.
