
Professor Pilar Somacarrera
Nominated Fellow, September 2022
Home Institution: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Project Title: Analogy and Transference between Gabriela Cunninghame Graham and Teresa of Avila
Teresa of Avila, mystic and saint of the Catholic Church, has had an excellent reception in Great Britain in general and in Scotland, in particular. In the context of the stark contrast between Teresa’s orthodox Catholic beliefs and the predominance of Presbyterianism as the official faith in Scotland since 1560, I am especially interested in the attraction Teresa of Avila exerted on nineteenth and turn-of-the century Scottish writers. The writer Gabriela Cunninghame Graham (1861-1906) —the object of this research, but, indeed a very strong subject as a woman in her own right —had published her two-volume biography of Teresa, Santa Teresa: Her Life and Times in 1894. Gabriela and Teresa seem to have lived parallel lives, despite the huge differences between them: one being a consecrated Catholic woman living in the 16the century and the second, a person with a secret identity, wife of an important Scottish politician, and a poet and writer of the Modernist era. Both women had to leave home in order to free themselves from their families and to achieve their true vocation. In this project, I am going to argue that the principles of analogy and transference can be applied to the connection between Teresa and Gabriela. In addition, through the study of her biography of Teresa of Avila, I will argue that that Gabriela Cunninghame Graham is much as a “cultural mediator” as her husband.