Caterina Albert i Paradis (1869-1966) began her career with a scandal. Her dramatic monologue
The Infanticide,
delivered by a young woman, won prizes and garnered the attention of the Catalan literary world, but its harsh theme drew outrage when the anonymous author was revealed to be a woman. In the tradition of George Eliot, George Sand, and other controversial women authors, Albert had assumed a man’s name, Victor Catala. She continued to write unflinching narratives, mostly in Catalan, of the people and life around her, producing a body of work still enlisted today to help the Catalan language resist the dominance of Peninsular Spanish.