Salem Press

Clara lived in a universe of her own invention, protected from life's inclement weather, where the prosaic truth of material objects mingled with the tumultuous reality of dreams and the laws of physics and logic did not always apply. Clara spent this time wrapped in her fantasies, accompanied by the spirits of the air, the water, and the earth. For nine years she was so happy that she felt no need to speak.

Notable Latino Writers
Isabel Allende

Born: Lima, Peru; August 2, 1942

Long Fiction: La casa de los espíritus, 1982 (The House of the Spirits, 1985); De amor y de sombra, 1984 (Of Love and Shadows, 1987); Eva Luna, 1987 (English translation, 1988); El plan infinito, 1991 (The Infinite Plan, 1993); Hija de la fortuna, 1999 (Daughter of Fortune, 1999); Portrait sépia, 2000 (Portrait in Sepia, 2001).

Short Fiction: Cuentos de Eva Luna, 1990 (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991).

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: La gorda de porcelana, 1984; Ciudad de las bestias, 2002 (City of the Beasts, 2002); El reino del dragón de oro, 2003 (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004); El bosque de los Pigmeos, 2004.

Nonfiction: Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertientes de Isabel Allende, 1974; Paula, 1994 (English translation, 1995); Conversations with Isabel Allende, 1999; Mi país inventado, 2003 (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003).

Miscellaneous: Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisiacos, 1997 (Afrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998).

Isabel Allende (IHZ-ah-behl ahl-YEHN-dee) begins every new book on January 8, a practice she continues for good luck ever since the success of her first book, The House of the Spirits. On January 8, 1981, while exiled in Venezuela, Allende was feeling guilty for not being with her dying grandfather. She had promised to be with him during his last days, but the military regime prevented her from returning to Chile. The letter she wrote that day eventually became The House of the Spirits, which launched Allende's career as a novelist; by the mid-1990's, she had become the most widely read Latin American woman writer.

Born to Chilean diplomat Tomás Allende and his wife Francisca Llona Barros, who separated after a few years of marriage, Isabel Allende and her two brothers lived in their maternal grandparents' home in Santiago, where their mother offset her economic dependence on her parents by working in a bank and stitching at home. During her childhood, the grandparents' library became a favorite spot. Allende enjoyed access to their large collection as well as the intellectual freedom to read books well beyond her age. Her formative years were marked by her grandparents, whom she first portrayed as Clara del Valle and Esteban Trueba in The House of the Spirits. She left her grandparents' home to live abroad with her mother and stepfather, a Chilean diplomat who had helped the family after Tomás Allende abandoned them in Peru. Tomás Allende disassociated himself completely from his wife and children, but his cousin, Salvador Allende, who in 1970 became president of Chile, maintained close ties with the family. As an adolescent, Isabel Allende found intellectual stimuli not so much in libraries but in the cultures of the various countries where her stepfather worked.

What to Read: The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits (1982), Isabel Allende's first novel, established the Chilean writer's international reputation and remains her best-known work. Drawing on the Latin American literary style of Magical Realism, the book tells the story of the Trueba family. Set in an unidentified South American country that resembles Allende's homeland, the novel chronicles the social and political forces that affect the family's fate.

The story begins with Esteban Trueba and his marriage to Clara del Valle, a young woman who possesses clairvoyant gifts and communicates easily with the spirit world. Their marriage produces a daughter, Blanca, and twin sons. Esteban also fathers a son by one of the women on his family estate; years later his illegitimate grandson, a member of the secret police, will torture his legitimate granddaughter, Alba, a political prisoner. Esteban's political ambitions take him to the country's senate, where he opposes left-wing reform efforts, while Blanca's affair with an burgeoning socialist results in Alba's birth. A subsequent leftist victory is short-lived, however, and the elected government is deposed in a military coup. Alba, who has married a leftist leader, is arrested and tortured before her grandfather can secure her release. In an effort to come to terms with all that has happened to her family, she sets about writing the book that will become The House of the Spirits.

Allende's novel has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) in its use of Magical Realism, which combines ordinary events with the fantastic to create vivid imagery. Allende maintains that much that seems incredible in the book is drawn from memories of her childhood. The characters of Esteban and Clara Trueba are based on her own maternal grandparents, and she began the book as a letter to her aging grandfather meant to reassure him that the family stories would live on through her. The book's political themes are also taken in part from Allende's family history; her uncle was Salvador Allende, the Socialist president slain in Chile's 1973 military coup.

Janet E. Lorenz

Soon after returning to Chile at age fifteen, Allende met her future husband, Miguel Frías. Eventually the couple married, and Allende supported the home with her journalism while Frías finished his engineering degree. Later, Allende balanced her duties as a homemaker, a journalist, and a mother of two children, Paula and Nicolás. Although she admits that objectivity never came easy and her journalistic writing often reflected her own perspective, training in journalism did provide the important skill of seizing and holding the reader's interest, essential also in fiction.

Allende's novels are rooted in personal experience. "The desire to write flares up inside me when I feel very strongly about something," she has said, "I need to feel a very deep emotion." After the bloody military coup in 1973 ousted Salvador Allende from the presidency, Isabel Allende continued her journalism while clandestinely helping persecuted people leave the country. In 1975, this work became too dangerous, and Allende, along with her husband and children, left for Venezuela. The House of the Spirits was also spawned from the years she felt paralyzed by the emotional devastation of exile and family displacement. Beyond the tale of political repression, The House of the Spirits depicts Latin America's heritage. Esteban Trueba, a self-made man, becomes wealthy by exploiting landless peasants. Allende combines elements of realism and fantasy to present a portraiture of Latin American existence, including a matriarchy sustained by generations of females knowledgeable in undermining male control.

Allende's second novel, Of Love and Shadows, continues her depiction of repression, torture, and death in Chile. The story focuses on the political killings of fifteen peasants that sparked international attention when their bodies were uncovered and the news was disclosed by the Catholic Church before the government could intervene. At that time, Allende's main concern was "telling about my continent, getting across our truth." Love, sorrow, violence, and death, frequently presented from a female's point of view, are recurrent topics in Allende's books.

By 1987, when Eva Luna was published, Allende had divorced Frías, left Venezuela, and moved to California. The character Eva Luna suggests an incarnation of Allende herself, a storyteller, an orphan--symbolic of exile--and a female whose life consists of a series of adventures. In Eva Luna, the reader gets to hear the stories which the protagonist of Eva Luna refers to in the novel but does not tell. Allende admits that she dislikes writing short stories and considers the genre a very difficult one that requires inspiration--something a writer does not control--more than the hard work and discipline for which she has trained herself. The Infinite Plan was Allende's first novel not related to Latin America. Inspired by her second husband's life and work in California among the Mexican American community, the novel focuses on Gregory Reeves, an Anglo who grows up in the barrio, escapes gang life, and pursues higher education. Reeves, like Allende's husband, dedicates his legal skills to Latino families.

Daughter of Fortune, set in the nineteenth century, is a novel about Eliza Sommers, a young woman who leaves her foster parents in Chile to find her lover, who has joined the California gold rush. Portrait in Sepia, published a year later, takes up the characters of Daughter of Fortune. Here, Eliza Sommers is a secondary personage as the grandmother of Aurora del Valle, whom she raises until the age of five and then parts from completely, leaving her in the care of Paulina del Valle. Aurora is a contemporary of and related to Clara del Valle from The House of the Spirits. Allende has referred to the three novels as a trilogy, but they are so only in the sense of having some overlapping characters and sharing as theme the exploration of women's roles.

The autobiographical Paula details Allende's anguish as she sits at her dying daughter's bedside in a Madrid hospital. During the year that Paula remains in a coma, Allende recounts the family history. The book ends with her daughter's death on December 6, 1992, in Allende's house in California. Allende's own mother, besides being a best friend, edits her daughter's manuscripts. The translations of Allende's books into dozens of languages and the numerous literary as well as honorary awards recognize her stature among world authors.

Gisela Norat

Learn More
Allende, Isabel. "Isabel Allende." http://www.isabelallende.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. This bilingual website includes biographical information, a list of books, frequently asked questions (and answers), and more than three dozen family photos.

_______. "Writing as an Act of Hope." In Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel, edited by William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Allende gives insight into her use of politics in her novels and stories.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Isabel Allende. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays examining genre and metarealism, the function of magic, female creativity, and other aspects of Allende's writing. Includes an introductory essay by Bloom, a short biography, and a chronology.

Cox, Karen Castellucci. Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. An analysis of The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, and Portrait in Sepia. Cox discusses the plot, character development, themes, style, and historical contexts of the these novels. She also provides an essay on Allende's life and another essay describing common elements of Allende's fiction.

Feal, Rosemary G., and Yvette E. Miller. Isabel Allende Today: An Anthology of Essays. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2002. Collection of essays focusing on Allende's ability for storytelling. Includes essays by Linda Gould Levine, Z. Nelly Martinez, Eliana Rivero, and other critics.

García Pinto, Magdalena, ed. Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Contains an excellent interview with Allende with a great deal of insight into the way she views her writing. It is here that Allende mentions that she sees herself as a troubadour going from village to village, person to person, talking about her country.

Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1989. This book gives a clear and lucid discussion of Allende's fiction, especially those elements of it identifiable as Magical Realism. Unfortunately, there are no translations for the Spanish quotations, but this is an extremely useful book.

Hart, Stephen M. White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America. London: Tamesis, 1993. Sets Allende's work within the context of women's writing in the twentieth century in Latin America. Examines the ways in which Allende fuses the space of the personal with that of the political in her fiction and shows that, in her work, falling in love with another human being is often aligned with falling in love with a political cause.

Levine, Linda Gould. Isabel Allende. New York: Twayne, 2002. A volume from Twayne's World Authors series. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Marketta, Laurila. "Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile." In International Women's Writing, New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. This book is helpful, both for Marketta's analysis of Allende's use of the language of exile and for other Allende materials in the collection.

Ramblado-Minero, Mariá de la Cinta. Isabel Allende's Writing of the Self: Trespassing the Boundaries of Fiction and Autobiography. Hispanic Literature 77. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Examines the autobiographical elements in Allende's fiction, describing how she re-creates self identity in her works.

Rodden, John. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. This series of interviews provides new autobiographical material in addition to answering most questions readers may have about Allende's work.

Rojas, Sonia Riquelme, and Edna Aguirre Rehbein, eds. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende's Novels. New York: P. Lang, 1991. Features in-depth essays on Allende's first three novels.

Swanson, Philip. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Chapter 9 contains a discussion of the use of popular culture in Allende's fiction, showing that the people and popular culture are seen to challenge official culture and patriarchy in her work. Also has a good introduction which sets Allende's work in the context of other postboom novelists of Latin America.

Williams, Raymond L. The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. Williams, one of Allende's most vigorous critics, argues that Allende's fiction simply imitates that of Gabriel García Márquez and that it is not postmodern in any real sense.