Emilia Pardo Bazán, born in the north-west Spanish region of Galicia in 1851, remained active as a prolific novelist, short-story writer and literary critic almost up to her death in 1921. David Henn examines Bazán's main thematic concerns in her first decade as a novelist: social tensions; environment and heredity as influences on character; the Feminist Question and the narrative portrayal of the female; political controversies. She is revealed as an acute, if tendentious, commentator on the affairs of her day. She was also vigorously engaged with current French and Spanish literary polemic; and her contributions to this area of vital literary debate are collated in this study, which makes the first full and systematic test of her fictional practice in relation to her theoretical stance.