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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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 21 November 2024.]
