In 1876 she won a literary prize offered by the municipality of Oviedo, for an essay entitled "Estudio crítico de las obras del padre Feijoo" ("Critical Essay on the Works of Father Feijoo"), the subject of her essay being a Benedictine monk. Emilia Pardo Bazán always had a great admiration for Feijoo, an eighteenth-century Galician intellectual, possibly due to his feminism "avant la lettre". She also published her first book of poems in the same year, entitled "Jaime" in honor of her newborn son. This was followed by a series of articles in "La Ciencia cristiana", a highly orthodox Roman Catholic magazine, edited by Juan Orti y Lara.