During the past month I had the great pleasure to travel to the Galician city of A Coruña in the northwestern corner of Spain to find out more about Emilia Pardo Bazán´s connections with other women writers of her time. Pardo Bazán is arguably the most canonised of all Spanish nineteenth-century women authors. She has left a very impressive heritage, not only in form of her countless novels, short stories, articles and essays but also  in brick and mortar: her mansion in the countryside definitely qualifies as a monument of historical importance -which is still owned by the family of Dictator Francisco Franco, but this is another story-, and her house in the old town of A Coruña shelters a museum about her life and work. At the same time, it is the seat of the Real Academia Galega with its fantastic archives and an excellent library.

I headed directly to the library, the deposit of what remains of Pardo Bazán´s personal book collections. Trying to make the most of a very short stay and the reduced summer opening times I went through almost two hundred of her books, all written by women, all inscribed with a personal dedication to “Doña Emilia”. They provided fascinating glimpses into literary etiquette (if in doubt, the wording “an offer of sympathy and admiration”  seems to be always acceptable if you want to send your own production to a well-established author), hierarchies, personal friendships, strategies of self-promotion and, of course, the sheer size of a transnational network in which books and pamphlets served as material tokens of connectedness. This expedition into nineteenth-century literary culture was only possible thanks to the astonishing commitment of the librarians Lois and Fernando. While most of the country was on holiday, they found ingenious ways of helping me with my quest, tirelessly looking for more and more books that nobody else seemed to have been interested in for quite a long time. And on the last day, they even helped me with my teaching preparations for the coming term, putting together an essential list of studies and resources about Galician migration. I will certainly tell my students all about it! This experience shows that the joy of research goes much beyond the thrill of the hunt for exciting results. In the end, it is all about connections, between texts and between people.