In 2014, Barack Obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. Dozens more books followed, including Daughter of Fortune, Inés of My Soul and City of the Beasts, which have been translated into more than 40 languages. On publishing her first book, the 1982 bestseller The House of the Spirits, she was celebrated as a new feminist voice in a male-dominated literary landscape.
Later she switched to writing novels examining family, history, displacement and the lives of women. In 1967, she co-founded the feminist magazine Paula, where she found she “could channel that anger into action”, and wrote a series of satirical columns on the patriarchy called “Civilize Your Troglodyte”. In my generation in Chile, if you didn’t have a formal engagement by age 23, you were a spinster.”Īllende ended up marrying three times, and never gave up the fight for equality. She was also worried I would never catch a husband. “When she saw me so willing to go out there and fight, she was scared and thought I would be ostracised. “She thought you couldn’t change what God had made this way,” she tells me. In her new book, The Soul of a Woman, she recalls her resentment as “an aberration in my family, which considered itself intellectual and modern but according to today’s standards was frankly Paleolithic.” Such was her fury, her mother took her to a doctor, suspecting colic or perhaps a tapeworm.Īllende, now 78, says she was frustrated on Panchita’s behalf but also at her refusal to stand up for herself. Observing her mother’s disempowerment, the young Isabel railed against male authority.
Following the annulment of her marriage, she was excommunicated by the church. Panchita moved back to her parents’ house in Santiago, where her father immediately took control of her finances. At the age of three, she saw her mother, Panchita, abandoned by her father and left to raise their three small children alone. T he Chilean American author Isabel Allende was a feminist long before she knew what the word meant.
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