Isabel Allende, La casa de los espíritus [The House of the Spirits]

M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo (Universidad Isabel I)

Ed. by Ben Bollig, University of Oxford
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 5.1.1: Hispanic Writing and Culture of South America.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Ben Bollig (University of Oxford), Ceire Broderick (University College Cork), Nuala Finnegan (University College Cork), Anna Forné (Gothenburg University), Cara Levey (University College Cork), Carolina Orloff (Independent Scholar - Europe), Lori Oxford (Western Carolina University), Ailsa Peate (University of Westminster)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1983

Places

Peru (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Chilean novelist Isabel Allende's international fame rests mainly on her first novel,

The House of the Spirits

(1982). Allende has often explained in interviews and public appearances that she began to write this novel as a response to her maternal grandfather's death. The news of his imminent death in Chile reached her while she was living in Venezuela, and the impossibility of saying goodbye to her grandfather moved her to write a farewell letter to him from the distance. This letter soon became

The House of the Spirits

. In

Paula

, Allende's first memoir dedicated to her daughter Paula, then in a coma and who would die a few months later, she told her daughter how she began the process of writing what was to become her first novel:

Today is January 8, 1992. On a day like today, eleven

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2264 words

Citation: Gomez-Galisteo, M. Carmen. "La casa de los espíritus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 February 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12685, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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