María Teresa León

María Teresa León (31 October 1903 – 13 December 1988) was a Spanish writer, activist and cultural ambassador. Born in Logroño, she was the niece of the Spanish feminist and writer María Goyri (the wife of Ramón Menéndez Pidal). She herself was married to the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. She contributed numerous articles to the periodical Diario de Burgos and published the children's books Cuentos para soñar and La bella del mal amor.

Daughter of Angel León, a colonel in the Spanish army, María Teresa grew up in a wealthy household filled with books and that was constantly on the move. As a girl she lived in Madrid, Barcelona and Burgos reading the books of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Benito Pérez Galdós. Due to the itinerant nature of her father's career, nomadism had a profound impact on her life. Her mother, Oliva Goyri, an unconventional woman for her day, sent her to study at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Education), where her aunt, María Goyri, taught. She earned a BA in Philosophy and Letters.

In 1920, when she was sixteen, she married Gonzalo de Sebastián Alfaro and had two sons, Gonzalo (b. 1921) and Enrique (b. 1925). The marriage didn't last, she lost custody of her two children and moved to her family home in Burgos. There she began to contribute articles for the Diario de Burgos that dealt with current affairs, culture, and women's rights. She wrote under the pseudonym Isabel Inghirami, the heroine of Gabriele d'Annunzio's Forse che sì, forse che no (Maybe yes, Maybe no). She made her first visit to Argentina in 1928. In 1929 she met the poet Rafael Alberti who was to become her lifetime companion. They were married in a civil ceremony in Mallorca in 1932. That year the Patronato del Centro para Ampliación de Estudios (Board for Advanced Studies) gave her a grant to study the European theatre movement. She travelled to Berlin, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the Soviet Union meeting the so-called "Revolutionary writers" and writing a dozen articles that were published in El Heraldo de Madrid.

...
Wikipedia