In the middle of the night, a woman awakens to find a stranger in her bedroom. Though she cannot determine who he is--or, indeed, whether he is even real at all and not just an extension of her dreams or her writing–she is drawn into a conversation...

An impassioned correspondence between two former school friends as they reach crisis in middle age, from the prize-winning Spanish novelist Carmen Martin Gaite Sofia is a mother of three grown-up children and trapped in a loveless marriage to Eduardo. Mariana is a successful psychiatrist, incapable of forming stable relationships with men. As their lives reach crises in middle age, these two women, former school friends who had grown apart, reach out to each other through an exchange of impassioned letters in Gaite's effusive epistolary novel. Mariana, a psychiatrist and TV pundit, flees Madrid for a friend's empty house in a coastal resort, where she obsesses over Raimundo, a suicidal, manic-depressive writer who seems part friend, part patient, part lover. Her old friend, Sofia, walks out on her vain, hypercritical husband, Eduardo, a business executive who talks only about money, and moves in with her three rebellious children, who share a disorderly apartment. In alternating voices mixing letters with notebook excerpts and invented stories, the two women relentlessly analyze their relationships, erotic fantasies and trips abroad. Strewn with allusions to Kafka, Dali, Bunuel, Tagore and Katherine Mansfield, their outpourings incorporate meditations on memory, love, sex, the treacherous nature of words, chance and the difficulty of confronting one's past without embellishing it.

A comprehensive examination of the full range of Carmen Martín Gaite's work. Carmen Martín Gaite produced a large body of work in various genres over the course of her five-decade career, though she is primarily known as a novelist, short story writer, and social commentator. Her work at times reflects, and at times defies, the pattern of development in Spanish fiction since the 1950s. This Companion offers a re-reading of Martín Gaite's works, emphasizing her early experimentalism which culminated in mid-career works (notably El cuarto de atrás), and stressing how, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the majority of Spanish novelists were engaged in a critique of history, Martín Gaite turned to the writing of cultural history, exploring its intersection with narrative fiction in a positivist rather than a nihilistic mode. Her exploration of gender issues, particularly mother-child relations, towards the end of her career anticipated new directions in feminist thought. Discussions of often-ignored works, such as poetry, drama, children's literature, and literary translations, offer insight into sidelined aspects of this writer's literary output. Catherine O'Leary is Reader in Spanish at the University of St Andrews. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Spanish at the University of Warwick.

She calls attention to the hypocrisy of the system, to the image versus the reality, and to how certain watchwords like "rationing" and "restriction" went beyond their economic applications to touch on personal behavior and attitudes." "Themes she touches on in the nine chapters (and epilogue) include proper dress and behavior for women; a young woman's limited future; the influence of the Falange (Fascist) party on society and on individual behaviour; the "rebel" girl; family life; sex; cinema and the Spaniard; and courtship and the stages of relationship."

Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite explores the last six novels by Spain ́s most honored contemporary woman writer. Its scholarship is enriched by the voice of Calila herself—as Brown called Martín Gaite, who was a dear friend—as they conversed and exchanged letters during the composition of the novels. The book opens with an introduction to Martín Gaite ́s life and literature and ends with a consideration of her legacy. Each central chapter analyzes a later novel in its historical, biographical, and critical contexts. From the young adult fantasy Caperucita en Manhattan (Red Riding Hood in Manhattan) to the post-Transition epistolary masterpiece Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloud), the Transition-era saga La Reina de las Nieves (The Farewell Angel), the Proustian reminiscence Lo raro es vivir (Living’s the Strange Thing), the narrative tapestry Irse de casa (Leaving Home), and the memoir of family secrets Los parentescos (Family Relations), these fascinating novels evoke themes that resonate today.

It was customary for the wife of a nobleman in eighteenth-century Spain to be courted fervently and seemingly forever, by a man who was not her husband. This liaison, accepted and even encouraged by the husband, was presumably platonic, though that may not always have been the case. It was carried on according to a complex, if ambiguous, code of companionship and whispered conversation. With the help of a lively blend of archival documents and literary sources, Carmen Martín Gaite admits us to the intricacies of the code and unravels its significance for the women who enjoyed the attention of a cortejo, or escort. Why was the cortejo tolerated, by society and by the woman's aristocratic family, even though it infringed traditional religious precepts? What did woman and her friend talk about at such length? Was their flirtation intellectual, reflecting the effects of Enlightenment rationalism on Spanish culture? Letters, memoirs, and travel journals as well as dramatic works of the period offer invaluable clues to the nature of these relationships, in which the woman was almost ritually adored and placed on a pedestal. The conversation, we learn, was generally frivolous, focusing on possessions and luxuries in a way that clearly signals economic change and the dawn of a material age. At the same time, the cortejo did represent a taste of symbolic liberation for women whose social lives were rigidly constrained. Clarifying details from a great variety of historical sources are presented with the urgency and fluidity of a novel in this excellent English translation -- Book jacket.