Emilia Pardo Bazán was born in 1851 in La Coruña. She is the daughter of Count José Pardo Bazán, a title that she will inherit upon his death, she receives a distinguished education in a French school. Thanks to the encouragement of her mother, who instilled in her a love of reading and writing since she was a child, she shows from a very young age a keen interest in Spanish classics, especially Cervantes and Plutarco, and foreign literature, being an early reader of La Fontaine and Jean Racine. She married José Quiroga at age 17, and moved to Madrid. She later traveled through Europe –England, Germany and Italy– with her parents, learning English and German, while she was informed of the European literary news.

In 1876 she made her debut as a writer with a Critical Study of the Works of Father Feijoo, and in the same year Francisco Giner de los Ríos published a collection of her poems that bear the name of her first son: Jaime. Three years later, she released her first novel, Pascual López, but it is from the eighties that her narrative takes on a defined, markedly naturalistic personality, with Un viaje de novios (1881) and La tribuna ( 1882).

In the magazine La Época she writes some articles on literary criticism about Émile Zola and the experimental novel, which she later collects under the title The Palpitant Question (1883), and which make it a key promoter of naturalism in Spain. These articles create a stir, to the point of costing him her divorce almost two years after her, due to her refusal to accept her husband's demand that she retract her writings and renounce her to write. In 1884 he published La ama joven, where the issue of marital crisis appeared, and began a love affair with Benito Pérez Galdós, which, despite Emilia's deceptions with young people like Lázaro Galdiano and Narcís Oller, lasted more than twenty years.

Her naturalistic method culminates in Los pazos de Ulloa (1886-1887), her best known work, in which she describes the decline of Galician rural life. Her literature ends up tending toward greater symbolism and spiritualism in the 1990s.