Poet and novelist · 1835-1862
Poet and novelist
Victorina Bridoux y Mazzini was a Romantic poet and novelist associated with Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Her posthumous book Lágrimas y flores made her the first woman associated with the Canary Islands to have a literary work published in book form.
She was born in Manchester on 9 April 1835, daughter of French merchant Carlos Honoré Bridoux and Cádiz-born poet and playwright Ángela Mazzini. After her father died during her childhood, she was educated at the Irish nuns' school in Gibraltar, where she excelled in music, languages and literature.
She arrived in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with her mother around 1852. She took part in charitable declamation events and published pieces in El Noticioso de Canarias and other newspapers of the period. In 1855 she married infantry captain Gregorio Domínguez de Castro; the couple had four children.
She died aged twenty-seven during the yellow fever epidemic of 1862. She had prepared Lágrimas y flores. Producciones literarias, which her husband published posthumously in 1863. Her heirs also issued the unfinished novels El bálsamo de las penas, Amparo and El secreto de la hermosura.
