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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Isabel Allende

by Janet McCann

Other literary forms

Isabel Allende (ah-YEHN-day) was a journalist before she turned to fiction, and she has published widely in many forms. In addition to news and feature articles, Allende has written fiction for children, including La gorda de porcelana (1984) and her internationally popular trilogy Ciudad de las bestias (2002; City of the Beasts, 2002), El reino del dragón de oro (2003; Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004), and El bosque de los Pigmeos (2004; Forest of the Pygmies, 2005). Her humor pieces include the essay collection Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertinentes de Isabel Allende (1974), and Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991) is a collection of her short stories. Allende has also written many essays, television scripts, and film documentaries. Her book-length memoir of her daughter’s illness and death, Paula (1994; English translation, 1995), includes excursions into her own life, and in 2007 she published a second memoir, La suma de los días (The Sum of our Days, 2008). Her book Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisiacos (1997; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998) is unclassifiable by genre, being a mingling of erotic recipes, stories, old wives’ tales, and advice about food and sex. Some of Allende’s work blurs the boundaries between novel and creative nonfiction. The real people and events of her own and her country’s past figure largely in her fiction writing, and “magical” elements, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, sometimes appear in her nonfiction.

Isabel Allende.

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(Reuters/Gustau Nacarino/Archive Photos)

Achievements

Isabel Allende’s books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have been best sellers in Europe, Latin America, and Australia as well as the United States. A few of the dozens of awards and honors Allende has won include Chile’s Best Novel of the Year award in 1983 for The House of the Spirits, France’s Grand Prix d’Evasion in 1984, Mexico’s Best Novel Award in 1985 for Of Love and Shadows, a German Author of the Year prize in 1986, and an American Critics’ Choice Award in 1996. Her work has been celebrated by major honors in more than a dozen countries, the range of awards reflecting her mixed popular and scholarly audience. She has also been awarded numerous honorary degrees from institutions including Bates College, Dominican College, New York State University, Florida Atlantic University, Columbia College Chicago, Lawrence University, Mills College, and Illinois Wesleyan University. Her version of Magical Realism has greatly influenced a new generation of experimental writers.

Biography

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to Chile when she was three years old; she comes from a major Chilean political family and identifies herself as a Chilean. Her childhood was spent with her maternal grandparents in Santiago, Chile, following the divorce of her parents. She represents her grandparents as Esteban and Clara Trueba in her best-known novel, The House of the Spirits. Educated partly in England and Europe, Allende returned to Chile in her early twenties to become a journalist and to involve herself in feminism and political causes. She spent the years 1964 through 1974 writing articles and editing journals; she also worked on television shows and film documentaries. Her early experiences before the 1973 military coup in Chile, which changed her life, included editing Paula magazine and conducting interviews for television stations.

Allende was married to engineer Miguel Frias in 1962 and was divorced from him in 1987; her two children, Paula and Nicholas, were born of this union. Her daughter Paula’s illness and death, the major tragedy of Allende’s adult life, are recounted in the memoir Paula. In 1988 Allende married William Gordon.

The daughter of a cousin of Chilean president Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende has always been preoccupied with Chilean history and politics, particularly the events leading to Salvador’s death during a military coup in 1973 that overthrew his socialist government and led to military commander Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s dictatorship. Chile’s internal problems have always been a major factor in her works. Allende at first attempted to help the forces attempting to overthrow the new regime, but she was forced to escape with her family to Venezuela in 1974. Following her exile, she lived in various parts of the world and taught in a number of institutions, including in the United States at the University of Virginia, Barnard College, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 2003 she was granted U.S. citizenship and moved to California. She has written about California, too, especially about the points at which its history and myth intersect with those of Spain—her popular 2005 novel Zorro is set in both countries.

Analysis

Isabel Allende’s work is at the forefront of the Magical Realism movement. Magical Realism is, in essence, the putting together of realistic events with fantastic details in a narrative that is written as if it were factual. Although it is practiced by authors worldwide, Magical Realism is associated mostly with Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) is perhaps the prototypical Magical Realist novel. Magical Realism equates intuitive knowledge with factual knowledge, so that readers’ definitions of reality are challenged and they are able to understand the importance of all types of knowledge. Allende adds another dimension to Magical Realism, because she often uses it to examine women’s issues and problems in Latin American society. Critic Patricia Hart has asked, “Has [Allende] by her politics, her commitment to women’s issues, her liberal, liberated female characters, and even her gender forged a new category that we might call magical feminism?” It seems clear from her works that she is not merely another Magical Realist writer. Her magical elements tend to define a concept of the feminine that equates it with fruition, generation, and the spiritual and allows hope for the future through womankind. Thus the green hair of Clara in The House of the Spirits may be seen as a complicated symbol suggesting intuition, passion, feminine nature, and growth.

Allende’s novels are many-layered, which may account for their tremendous popularity worldwide and their translation into so many languages. Each contains a striking narrative, often with elements of the surreal woven into the story so flawlessly that readers are forced to accept the fantastic premises (such as women being born with green hair, levitating, or reading minds) as though these were ordinary physical facts. (Allende’s later works, however, excluding the children’s trilogy, have less recognizable Magical Realism in them.) The narratives build up lively suspense, and the intriguing plots and unusual, yet somehow believable, characters contribute to the appeal. Allende uses startling symbolism to define the male and female realms of power and influence and to show how women manage to achieve power for good even in societies that greatly repress them. Allende also makes use of the political narrative, which may not be fully understandable to readers unfamiliar with Latin American history. However, the representation of history is also woven into the narrative fabric, so readers do not feel their lack of knowledge; rather, they learn without effort. Allende is that rarity, a popular novelist whose work has literary complexity and merits rereading.

The House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits, Allende’s first novel, remains her most widely read book. It is based on the events of her childhood and on the Chilean political situation that resulted in the death of her cousin Salvador Allende. It tells the story of three generations of women, from the traditionally feminine Clara, based in part on Allende’s own grandmother, to Blanca, her daughter, who appears to conform to the family’s expectations, to Alba, Clara’s grandchild and the revolutionary who barely holds on to her life. Despite their differences, the three women—whose names mean “clear” (Clara) or “white” (Blanca and Alba)—have deep unconscious bonds that help them survive overwhelming odds. These bonds include the inheritance of extrasensory perception, which, most vivid in the child Clara and in her beautiful doomed sister Rosa, begins the story. The women could be seen as simply swept along in the masculine-dominated course of events, but they are not: Although their actions and motivations are markedly different from the men’s, and although their actions are circumscribed by custom, the women play an important role. Theclimax of the story, a bloody confrontation between the aristocrats and the socialist government of Chile, is an account of the actual military coup that resulted in Salvador Allende’s death and Isabel Allende’s exile from Chile.

The novel traces the lives of the women and their men, three generations of masculine pride and feminine intuition, of bloodshed and love. The frame story involves the healing of wounds between the granddaughter Alba and her dying grandfather, Esteban Trueba, whose unyielding pride has caused much grief for many. This healing is facilitated by the reading of grandmother Clara’s diaries, which help Alba to understand her grandfather and her family’s and country’s history.

Sex roles are clearly defined in the story: the men from the old tradition associated with conquering and controlling, the women left to a kitchen role and keeping their values and hopes alive through their intuitions and their spiritual communication. As the society becomes more modern, these gender definitions change somewhat, but they are never eliminated. The change gives rise to hope that new politics may bring about a new understanding between the sexes, which will allow more freedom to both.

Of Love and Shadows

Of Love and Shadows is less a Magical Realist novel than is The House of the Spirits. It is based on a real event, the finding of fifteen bodies in a secret grave in the Chilean countryside. This novel also uses the paranormal in a factual way, but the “miracles” are marginal to the story of love and death in a world that mirrors dictator Pinochet’s.

The story has a fairy-tale beginning, describing the switching of two identically named babies. One baby grows into an epileptic seer whose disappearance will be investigated by Irene Beltran and Francisco Leal, the daughter of a wealthy family and the son of a Spanish Civil War exile. These two work together as reporter and photographer to unravel a mystery. Several members of the sindicato agrícola, a farmers’ organization set up during the brief agrarian reform, have mysteriously vanished. When Evangelina Ranquileo, an adolescent mystic, publicly accuses Juan de Dios Ramírez of the crime, she disappears too. Irene and Francisco work toward the foregone conclusion: discovery of massive political corruption and murder.

The “shadows” of the title refer to this sinister event; the “love” of the title refers to the affair that takes place between Irene and Francisco after Irene leaves her less-intellectual soldier lover. Widely read in the wake of The House of the Spirits, this novel is less popular with scholars, partly because its political message and its love story are less neatly woven together than in the earlier novel, and partly because the magical and realistic elements of the story do not form the seamless unity seen in The House of the Spirits. Nevertheless, the persuasive political message and the ebullient, passionate love story make Of Love and Shadows memorable reading, and while Allende’s characteristic magical elements are less highlighted than previously, they are present with their symbolic force.

Eva Luna

In Eva Luna, Magical Realism reasserts itself, in a book that is as complex and as playful about serious concerns as The House of the Spirits. Eva Luna, the narrator, tells the story of her life, which includes the stories of countless other lives. The line is thin between Eva’s made-up world (“I describe life as I would like it to be”) and the real world from which she draws her stories. Eva is a hapless child born of a servant girl’s desire to comfort a South American Indian dying of a snakebite. However, the painful and odd things that happen to her do not leave her embittered; rather, she becomes open to others’ experiences and empathizes with them. As critic Alan Ryan commented, “For Eva Luna, everything that happens in life is a conjunction of countless stories already in progress and, at the same time, the starting point for others not yet told.…Stories, for her, transform life. When a character tells Eva of the sad death of his sister, Eva invents another story: ’All right, she died, but not the way you say. Let’s find a happy ending for her.’ And so it is. . . .”

Latin American political events are present in this novel too, but they are not so well known as those in The House of the Spirits, nor are the political messages so clearly underscored as those in Of Love and Shadows. The casual or uninformed reader may miss them. Some critics have found the story sentimental because of the improbable happy ending and the irrepressible good nature of the main character, despite some Candide-like misfortunes. Other critics have balked at the number of stories left open-ended, situations never resolved. Still, the structure of the novel represents the incoherent tangle of lives. This novel blurs the real and the surreal and provides a constant challenge to linear thinking.

Portrait in Sepia

Portrait in Sepia, a companion to the novel that preceded it, Daughter of Fortune, tells the story of Aurora del Valle, a young woman who does not remember her early childhood. The mystical, matriarchal family of both Daughter of Fortune and Allende’s most famous work, House of the Spirits, endures more of the turbulent Chilean history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Eliza Sommers, the protagonist of Daughter of Fortune, is here the grandmother of this story’s main character, Aurora del Valle. Aurora is the relative and contemporary of Clara del Valle of House of the Spirits. The three novels share the theme of women’s special gifts and abilities within a violent society run by men.

Aurora tells of her birth in San Francisco in 1880 and her inability to remember what her life was like before she was taken to live in Chile with her grandmother, Paulina del Valle. She decides at a plateau in her life that she needs to find out who she is before she can commit herself to another and live her life. She is a photographer, and she uses photographs to find as well as to define herself as she travels from relative to relative, finding pieces of a puzzle that will at last yield her completed past. She learns ultimately of the events surrounding her mother’s and grandfather’s deaths and the history that led to her being reared in Chile. Her discoveries, though horrifying, free her at last to move toward a positive future.

Much of the story in Portrait in Sepia consists of Aurora’s memories of growing up in Chile and of her relationships with the strong women who played major parts in her life. These mysterious, sometimes clairvoyant women stand out in strong opposition to the shadowy men who exert political power for political ends.

Inés of My Soul

Inés of My Soul is a fairly straightforward historical novel; Allende has described it as “a work of intuition” but added that “any similarity to events and persons relating to the conquest of Chile is not coincidental.” It reaches further back into the Chilean past than her other novels to tell the story of Inés Suárez, a sixteenth century woman who was married to a conquistador and played an important part in the foundation of Chile.

The novel is a romanticized version of Inés’s life. The bloody Spanish conquest and the upheavals surrounding it serve as background for her tale of passion involving several men who played major parts in the conquest. While the novel does not exactly glorify the conquistadors, it does throw a veil of the romantic over this shameful period in Spain’s history. In this book, however, the romance is paramount; history serves romance.

This extraordinary woman rose from seamstress to a position of power, even wielding swords with the band of Pedro de Valdivia, who became her most passionate lover. After their affair and the conquest are over, she marries Rodrigo de Quiroga and settles down with this man, governor and conquistador, for whom she feels “a mature, joyful sentiment” rather than the excess and abandon of her passion for Valdivia. Inés is a widow close to the end of her life when she narrates the story to Isabel, daughter of her late husband. The subtleties of Allende’s trademark Magical Realism and its multilayered symbolism are mostly lacking in this fast-paced narrative, which has a strong appeal to romance readers as well as history buffs.

Bibliography

1 

Allende, Isabel. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Edited by John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Collection of interviews with the author sheds some light on her life and work.

2 

_______. My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Memoir presents Allende’s reflections on the land of her youth, the people she knew, and history. This work illuminates the author’s semiautobiographical novels.

3 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Isabel Allende. New York: Chelsea House, 2002. Collection of essays on Allende’s work includes an informative editor’s introduction as well as analyses by other major scholars.

4 

Correas Zapata, Celia. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002. First biographical discussion of Allende in book form, written by an admiring but scholarly friend of the novelist, provides an intimate glimpse into Allende’s life.

5 

Cox, Karen Castellucci. Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Presents down-to-earth analysis of Allende’s novels through Portrait in Sepia. Includes a biographical sketch.

6 

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

7 

Gough, Elizabeth. “Vision and Revision: Voyeurism in the Works of Isabel Allende.” Journal of Modern Literature 27, no. 4 (2004): 93-120. Offers an insightful and readable analysis of photography, spying, and hidden observation as themes in Allende’s work.

8 

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.

9 

Levine, Linda Gould. Isabel Allende. New York: Twayne, 2002. Good introductory work presents analysis of Allende’s works. Includes bibliographical references and index.

10 

Rojas, Sonia Riquelme, and Edna Aguirre Rehbein, eds. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Collection of essays provides in-depth discussion of Allende’s first three novels.

11 

Swanson, Philip. The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom. New York: 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 that sets Allende’s work in the context of the works of other post-Latin American boom novelists.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
McCann, Janet. "Isabel Allende." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_10210140000006.
APA 7th
McCann, J. (2010). Isabel Allende. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
McCann, Janet. "Isabel Allende." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.