Emilia Pardo Bazán, “Vampiro” [Vampire] (1901) 1

Emilia Pardo Bazan is one of the few nineteenth-century women writers accepted by the Spanish literary establishment as canonical and the most prominent of those few. Although she lived in Madrid for much of her adult life and also travelled widely, she was a Galician and set many of her fictional texts there, including “Vampiro”. "Champana”, features a woman working as a prostitute who explains to a client how she came to that profession: she was in love with a penniless man her own age, her tongue loosened by the champagne she had drunk at the wedding feast, she told him about her past. Expecting her merely to share a bed with him, however, is not necessarily as neutral or seemingly harmless as it may appear to a reader. The novel Henry James’s The Sacred Fount is lengthy, complex, and was not translated rapidly, so it is unlikely that Emilia Pardo Bazán had read it before inventing her own story.