Her education, so far as she did not get it by herself, was principally obtained in a fashionable French boarding-school in Madrid, where “Télémaque” was served up three times a day, and where Emilia was given the idea that she had exhausted the possibilities of astronomical science when she had looked at an eclipse through a bit of smoked glass. Later she was turned over to the tender mercies of tutors. Instead of lessons on the piano, she begged her father to allow her to study Latin; but this was quite too wild a thing to ask, even of him, and his refusal only gave her a lasting hatred for the piano. By the time she was fourteen, she was allowed to read pretty much everything, though still forbidden to look into the works of Hugo, Dumas, and the French Romanticists generally. Instead of these, an uncle put into her hands the novels of Fernan Caballero--a most suggestive incident, the woman who worked out the beginnings of the modern Spanish novel, read by the girl who was to help carry it to its highest development! However, her unformed taste thought nothing worthy to be called a novel unless a man was fired out of a cannon or flung over a cliff in every chapter, and her furtive reading of Hugo--of course, she tasted the forbidden waters--confirmed her in a liking which she was long in outgrowing.
In 1868, just after she had first put on long dresses, she was married. To make short work with her domestic life, let it be added, that her husband’s name is Don José Quiroga, and that three children have been born to them. During the troublous times that came in with the Revolution of 1868, and throughout the reign of Amadeus, her family was in political eclipse, and with her father she traveled extensively in France and southern Europe, learning English and Italian, and from her industrious practice of keeping a diary acquiring the writing habit. On her return to Spain, she found the German philosophical influence in the ascendant, and to put herself abreast of the intellectual movement of the time, read deeply in philosophy and history. By this time she had come fully to perceive the defective nature of her education, and set herself rigorously to correct it, for some years devoting herself to the severest studies. At a literary contest in Orense, in 1876, she carried off the first prize both in prose and verse, though for three years after that she wrote nothing except occasional articles for a Madrid periodical. Finally, as a relaxation from her strenuous historical studies, she began reading novels again, beginning with contemporary English, French, and Italian writers; for in her provincial home, and in her absorption in philosophical and historical reading, she had never heard of the splendid development of the novel in her own country. At last a friend put her on the track, and then she read with deepening delight.