# Amalia Domingo Soler

Amalia Domingo Soler (Seville, 10 November 1835 – Barcelona, 29 April 1909) was a Spanish writer, novelist, and feminist, who also wrote poetry, essays, short stories, as well as an autobiography, Memorias de una mujer. She is known for her involvement in the Spanish spiritist movement. Her writings are characterized by poetic and delicate style. She is remembered for her book "Memories of Father Germano". She founded and edited a spiritist weekly, La Luz del Porvenir, characterized by its radical views and feminist orientation. She also served as the editor-in-chief of Luz y unión which succeeded La Luz del Porvenir in 1900. She dedicated more than 30 years to the dissemination of the teachings codified by Kardec.

## Early life

Amalia was born in Seville, on November 10, 1835. Most of her life took place in a Spain. She is born into a broken family, as her father is absent, leaving her mother with an income that he thinks will be enough to support them both. Three days after her birth, she began to suffer from an illness in her eyes that would last her entire life and that would cause her mother to dedicate herself solely and exclusively to caring for Amalia and educating her.
She learned to read at the age of five; her moral education was rigorous.
They go everywhere together. In churches, Amalia only perceives the luxury or beauty of the statues, but no religious claim. The socio-cultural context in which Amalia lives, together with the illness and death of her mother, are two elements that will especially condition her life. When her mother dies, in June 1860, Amalia is 25 years old. She is a spinster, without a family, without income from her work or from rents. She sells the furniture in the house and reduces all of her belongings to what fits in the room in which her mother died. She is so affected that it will take her three months to recover her memory.

## Seamstress

She finally decides to accept a pension from her father's relatives, in exchange for being the family seamstress. The pension will last six months, during which she continues living in the same room in which her mother died. Once the pension is over and without resources, she will begin travel through several cities with friends of her mother. This itinerary will lead Amalia to the need to look for work in Madrid, where she hopes to work as a seamstress, and for her poetry to be more valued and remunerated more than it had been until now.
At the beginning of the 1870s, Amalia delved into the study of Spiritism. In a short time, her poetry was published in El Criterio and other spiritist magazines of the time, although she did not stop sewing to obtain sufficient income for her personal maintenance.
After visits to Dr. Joaquín Hysern's office, she learns about the existence of the Spiritist doctrine and how it answers the questions that worried her so much about the reason for the apparent inequality between people as no theory or religion had responded rationally to these questions. She continues to frequent the evangelical chapel on Calatrava Street, where she goes together with her friend Engracia de Ella, and where she had managed to be known. She continues to hear the sermons of the evangelists who sometimes manage to convince her with her arguments, although other times, she is the one who mentally refutes them. She gets a spiritist family to give her The Book of Spirits, although she can only read it for 30 minutes in the morning, resting every 20 lines. One morning, when she was fixing a tunic (she sews for 15 minutes at a time), she unexpectedly regains her vision, opening up a new life for her.

## Vision regained

With the copies of El Criterio she reads Fernández Colavida and Lagier y Pomares. Since she cannot subscribe to the magazine, she sends poems in exchange for the subscription. She will do the same with as many spiritist magazines as she knows. She will ask to be introduced to the Spanish Spiritualist Society and will begin to frequent its meetings, so much so that on the 5th anniversary of Allan Kardec's death (03-31-1874) she speaks for the first time in public and reads a poem titled "In memory of A. Kardec". From that moment on he always counts on her.
Her work day is endless. She sews in a French woman's sewing workshop and there, she composes the poems that she must keep in her memory or that the owner's niece writes on paper by dictation. She faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the directors of the magazines in which she collaborates insist on the need for her to continue writing, as her articles are highly commented on and valued as they are written in a plain and accessible language that everyone understands. On the other hand, she feels the need to earn her own living and not be a burden to others or to Spiritualism. She must continue sewing because it is the only way to support herself.
Continuing with her eyesight problems, oculists recommend sea baths. As she is known throughout Spain, a spiritualist family from Alicante sends her the money to make the trip and invites her to their house. Her day begins at four in the morning, at which time she takes a bath, and the rest of the day she dedicates to writing. She visits the spiritualists of Jijona and there she falls ill with fever. Thus, a trip that she thought would last a month turns into a stay of four months after which she recovers and returns to Madrid.
Her return in Madrid meant for Amalia the opportunity to fully dedicate herself to Spiritism. Overcoming great difficulties, she brought knowledge and charity with her. She returns to the French woman's sewing workshop and returns to live with her sister-friend-landlady, to whom she had previously rented a room with a desk where she could write and prepare her articles and collaborations. with magazines. Now the domestic situation has changed: her old room is occupied. Since she doesn't want to be separated from her sister, they decide to share the room and even the bed. She has no place to write and she does it at the kitchen table, without privacy, with continuous interruptions and being continually harassed by the Spirits who incessantly push her to write. It is very difficult for her to combine her work as a seamstress with her collaborations in magazines.

## Barcelona

In May 1876, she received a visit from two Catalan spiritualists with the proposal from Luis Llach, then president of La Buena Nueva de Gracia, that she move to Barcelona and dedicate herself entirely to writing. In Barcelona, she will find work and better pay, with and will have more time to dedicate to writing. This convinces her, as well as the possibility that her sister's landlady along with her family will also move to Gracia.
Upon arrival in Barcelona, Amalia and Luis Llach have a conversation in which they both explain intentions -- Amalia, that of being independent, looking for work and writing, and Llach, that of the lack of writers and disseminators of spiritualism and the excess of dressmakers and seamstresses. Soon, Amalia accepts the hospitality of the entire family, but she encounters the abandonment of her loved ones, the lack of knowledge of the language, aggravated by her vision problem and by the natural adaptation to the dynamics of a family she does not know. She feels clumsy and thinks she is more of a nuisance than a help. Her only way out is her articles and she sets to work on them frantically.

## Women's rights

There is a lot of correspondence that she receives and to which she responds personally. The spiritualists, aware of her hardship, help her by giving her stamps, paper, envelopes, ink, a writing pad. Everything is smoothed out. At the end of August 1877, an article was published in El Diario de Barcelona in which atrocities were said about Spiritism. L.Llach encourages her to answer in the terms she considers appropriate. Shortly after, she was consecrated as a defender of Spiritism thanks to the controversy held with D. Vicente de Manterola. This will not be the only controversy whe maintains; whe will repeat it again, a few years later, with a Piarist, Father Sallarés, and with a Jesuit, Father Fita, and which will be collected in a book entitled Impressions and comments on the sermons of a Piarist and a Jesuit. Coinciding with the controversy with D. Vicente de Manterola, L. Llach and the spiritist editor Juan Torrents proposed the creation of a spiritist weekly directed by her, for women and in which only women write. La Luz del Porvenir and Cándida Sanz, Matilde Fernandez, Encarnación del Riego, etc. will write in it. The list would be endless. Her collaborators send her articles from all Spanish-speaking countries and she maintains a relationship of close friendship with them. Some letters that remain from this correspondence are a good reflection.
With this she becomes a pioneer defender of women's rights, demanding the right to education, the free exercise of all professions, equal rights and salaries, independence, dignity. With respect to education, she defended the need to change the female educational system, because until then, women's education was very superficial, designed to develop in a domestic environment and not designed to be able to develop in a professional environment.
The first issue of La Luz del Porvenir is suspended by judicial means for 42 weeks. She is not afraid and releases The Echo of Truth, with the same characteristics and the same collaborators. It will continue to be published until an amnesty makes the publication of La Luz del Porvenir possible again. This weekly will be published until 1900, the year in which Amalia decides to stop publishing it due to the serious financial problems that the magazine is going through.
Amalia's work does not end with the publication of the weekly but is enhanced with actions in other fields, meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged, collecting aid for those affected by the floods in Murcia, visiting prisoners in the prisons of Barcelona, visiting hospitals to give comfort with his presence and his words to as many people as need it. She, along with other spiritualists (Luis Vives y Vives), founded the Society of Civil Burials given the difficulty that lay people and non-Catholics encounter in burying her relatives in a dignified and economical manner.

## Medium

In the midst of all this maelstrom Amalia feels deeply melancholy. She talks about it with her friends and one of them, Eudaldo Pagés, an unconscious medium, enters a trance and gives her the first communication on behalf of Father Germán. From that moment on, he will help her with her most important writings and with the necessary explanations to make her task easier. A collaboration begins between Amalia-Eudaldo-Father Germán that will give momentum to many good writings, and will also help her illustrate practical cases, stories of common lives collected through press clippings sent to her from all over Latin America and Spain and that are explained through the Law of Cause and Effect.
Her work is so great that the magazine El Buen Sentido of Lérida promotes a popular subscription that helps Amalia cover her expenses in the form of a perpetual pension. This pension will last from July 1881 to December 1884. The people who participate through donations in this pension are the readers of the magazines, spiritualists, who do not have much income either. At first the donations are numerous, then as the days go by they decrease. Once this pension is over, she will continue living with the help of Luis Llach, who considers her another member of his family and who will not abandon her until her death.
She participated as vice president in the World Spiritist Congress that was held in Barcelona in 1888.

## Later life and death

Amalia is getting older. Her environment changes. The people who have helped her have grown old with her or have died. After Luis himself dies, Amalia's economic situation becomes so dismal that she is forced to sell her books to try to cope with the situation. Eduardo also grows old and sick. He moves to the center of La Buena Nueva to live with Amalia to always be at her disposal; he also dies. Another medium, María, helps Amalia in her work, but Amalia distrusts her despite the assurances that Father Germán gives her about this second medium.
In her later life, old and sick, Amalia finds herself alone, economically and emotionally. Though she is surrounded by women who love her and care for her, the two men who have helped her the most in her work are gone. Amalia died April 29, 1909 due to broncho-pneumonia.

## Publications

* Un ramo de amapolas y una lluvia de perlas, o sea, un milagro de la Virgen de la Misericordia, 1868
* Memorias del Padre Germán, 1900
* Memorias de la insigne cantora del espiritismo, 1912
* Te perdono!: Memorias de un espíritu, 1944
* Sus más hermosos escritos, 1952
* Réplica a la escuela materialista
* El Espiritismo
* Ramos de Violetas
* Memorias de una mujer
* Hechos que prueban
* Réplicas de Amalia
* La Luz del Camino
* Cuentos Espiritistas
* Las Grandes Virtudes