At age Twenty she received her law degree, a rather uncommon occurrence for a woman at the time.” [1] She emigrated to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).
In 1935 she received the Concursal Teatral Universitario award from the Universidad Autónoma in Barcelona for her first play, Judith, which was written in Catalan, and in 1954 she earned the “máximo reconocimento en el teatro mexicano” (the maximum recognition in Mexican theatre)[3] when she won the award at the Concurso de Grupos Teatrales del Distrito Federal (Mexico City Theatre Conference) for her play Los años de prueba.
Carballido, in his prologue to Algarra’s complete works anthology affirms that “las obras de teatro…siguen brillantes y actuales” (the plays continue to be brilliant and currently relevant);[5] while other critics are not quite as complimentary.
In the Algarra entry in the reference book Teatro español [de la A a la Z], by Javier Huerta Clavo, Emilio Peral Vega and Hector Urzáiz Tortajada, several of her plays are mentioned, and then the authors refer to “[t]ítulos posteriores…donde insiste en sus ideas antiburguesas y revolucionarias con un plantamiento formal demasiado maniqueo y discursivo” (later titles where [Algarra] insists on her anti-bourgeois and revolutionary ideas with an overly manichaeistic and overly discursive formal approach).
He laments that Algarra died when “lo mejor de su obra estaba por llegar” (the best of her work was yet to come) and claims that “logró una presencia escénica en México muy superior, que hubiera constituido una de las mayores influencias del exilio teatral español en México, de no haberse interrumpido tan pronto su vida” (she achieved a superior stage presence in Mexico that would have constituted one of the greatest influences on Spanish theatre of exile in Mexico had her life not been interrupted so early).