María Rosa Lida

Outstanding Disciple and Effective Mediator According to the Correspondence with Américo Castro

Abstract

María Rosa Lida (1910-1962) was a brilliant scholar and sagacious researcher, author of monumental books that became an inescapable reference. However, she did not reach to work as a teacher except sporadically, which prevented her from forming disciples. This circumstance was due in part to the fact that her teachers –Amado Alonso, Américo Castro– believed that the disciple's wisdom corresponded earlier to the silent environment of libraries and archives (and to hyper-specialized production for connoisseurs) than to the daily work of awakening interest in students. Another reason was that the rules of the University of Berkeley, where her husband Yakov Malkiel worked, prevented her from taking a tenure. Surrounded by men who could not compete with her gifts and did not need to do so for immediate benefits, she was overshadowed by the way in which she related to them and in which she bowed to the conditions of an intellectual world and a domestic primer that recommended that she be kept in a discreet background. The investigation of the correspondence that he had with Castro over fifteen years proposes a specific clipping on the ancillary condition that a woman of such extraordinary importance occupied.