Solitude: A Novel of Catalonia
Caterina "Víctor" Albert "Català"the patriotic masculine pen name Víctor Català, is considered one of
Catalonia’s greatest novelists. Born in L’Escala, a fishing village near both
the French border and the ancient Greek settlement at Empuries, she began
writing songs and poems secretly as a little girl, but it was not until 1901
that she published her first book, El cant dels mesos (Song of the Months).
By 1905, when Solitude appeared, she had also brought forth three volumes
of short stories and was ranked among her nation’s leading authors.
Solitude, however, which might have been the beginning of Víctor Català’s
career as a writer at the peak of her powers, proved also to be its end.
Though she published another half-dozen books in the following sixty years,
none was well received by critics or readers, and today her reputation still
rests mainly upon her work between 1900 and 1905. Naturally, one would
like to know what went wrong, but the evidence is slim and one can only
guess at the reasons for her prolonged silences and gradual withdrawal
from public life not to mention her reluctance to enter it in the first place
which prevented her from claiming the literary prizes her early work had
won her.