the intellectual circles of her era, Emilia Pardo Bazán became the first woman to preside over the literature section of the Ateneo de Madrid in 1906, and the first to occupy a chair of Neo-Latin literature at the Central University Of Madrid (former name of The Complutense University of Madrid). She inherited the title of Countess on her father's death in 1908 and in 1910 was appointed a member of the Council of Public Instruction. In 1921 she was appointed to the Senate but never formally took up her seat. Much to her frustration, she was repeatedly refused a seat at the Spanish Royal Academy, purely on the grounds of her sex. She died in Madrid in 1921. Racial determinism According to Brian J. Dendle, her naturalism partially drinks from late 19th-century theories of racial heritage and atavism. She was well-versed in the racial theories applied to criminology by Cesare Lombroso. Featuring a Catholic ideological matrix close to Pidal y Mon, she espoused nonetheless racist views. She held antisemitic ideas, to the point of denigrating both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. She tried to justify antisemitism in 1899 in the context of the Dreyfus affair in the pages of La Ilustración Artística: "The Dreyfus affair is nothing but an episode of the secular struggle that covered the Middle Ages in blood in the streets of Valencia and Toledo [...] The crusade against Dreyfus can be explained, and as it can be explained it can be partially justified". Food writer Fond of gastronomy, in 1905 Pardo Bazán prologued La cocina práctica ("the practical cuisine") by her friend Manuel Purga y Parga, aka Picadillo. She later wrote her own culinary works, such as La cocina española antigua (1913). She is credited as one of the food writers and gastronomes who joined the initiative for pushing forward the idea of the modern Spanish national cuisine in the early 20th-century, recognisable by Spaniards as their own. Translations into English The House of Ulloa, translated by Paul O’Prey, Penguin Books, 1990 Mother Nature, translated by Walter Borenstein, Bucknell University Press, 2010 The Tribune of the People, translated by Walter Borenstein, Bucknell University Press, 1999 The White Horse and Other Stories, translated by Robert M Fedorchek, Bucknell University Press, 1993 Torn Lace and Other Stories, translated by Maria Cristina Urruela, Modern Language Association of America, 1997 Take Six: Six Spanish Women Writers, edited and translated by Kathryn