Abstract
If Cabrera Infante is Latin America’s most celebrated biscriptive writer, María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980) is one of the most neglected. Not that her work has been ignored, for even though she wrote very little—a handful of short stories and two novellas—her fiction has been the object of almost uninterrupted commentary ever since the publication of her first book in 1934. Usually regarded as Spanish America’s most important female novelist, Bombal holds a secure place not only as one of the continent’s first feminist voices but as a precursor to the magical realists of the 1960s and 1970s—“the mother of us all,” as Carlos Fuentes once remarked.
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Notes
Respectively in: Ágata Gligo, María Luisa (Sobre la vida de María Luisa Bombal) (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1985), 124
Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, “Escritura y trama biográfica,” in Literatura como intertextualidad, IX Simposio internacional de literatura, ed. Juana Alcira Arancibia (Buenos Aires: Instituto Literario Cultural Hispánico, 1993), 134
Gloria Gálvez Lira, María Luisa Bombal: Realidad y fantasía (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1986), 9
Kimberly A. Nance, “Contained in Criticism, Lost in Translation: Representation of Sexuality and the Fantastic in Bombal’s La Última niebla and House of Mist,” Hispanófila 130 (September 2000): 42.
Page numbers refer to María Luisa Bombat, Obras completas [OC], ed. Lucía Guerra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1996).
Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Díaz is the only critic to date to take seriously Bombal’s anglophone fiction. My comments on House of Mist are indebted to his incisive reading of the novel.
Marjorie Agosín, Las desterradas del paraíso, protagonistas en la narrativa de María Luisa Bombal (New York: Senda Nueva de Ediciones, 1983), 123.
Lucía Guerra Cunningham, La narrativa de María Luisa Bombal: Visión de la existencia femenina (Madrid: Playor, 1980), 8.
María Luisa Bombal, House of Mist and The Shrouded Woman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), viii.
Maria Luisa Bombal, House of Mist [HM] (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947), 245. Other page numbers will refer to this edition.
Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 37.
Cedomil Goic, “La última niebla: Consideraciones en torno a la estructura de la novela contemporánea,” Anales de la Universidad de Chile 121 (1964): 59–83.
As quoted by Ester Matte Alessandri, “María Luisa Bombal o la búsqueda del amor,” in Maria Luisa Bombal: Apreciaciones críticas, ed. Marjorie Agosín, Elena Gascón-Vera, Joy Renjilian-Burly (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1987), 15.
Calvert Casey, The Collected Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 192.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Spanish Passion, English Peace. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_7
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