Isabel Allende
(1942– )
From earliest childhood, Isabel Allende loved making up her own imaginative tales. By the age of seventeen, she was already making a living with words, working as a journalist in Santiago, the capital of her homeland, Chile. But her storyteller’s urge to embellish reality was strong. She recalls that she had difficulty being objective; she wanted to transform reality in the features she wrote.
Allende—who was born in Lima, Peru, where her Chilean diplomat father was stationed—read and traveled widely in her youth. Her parents divorced when she was very young, and much of her childhood was spent with her mother and maternal grandparents in Santiago, Chile.
Growing up, Allende was close to her uncle, Salvador Allende, who would become the president of Chile in 1970. This relationship would be at the center of the biggest crisis of Allende’s life: In September 1973, a bloody military coup ended the life of President Salvador Allende and threw Chile into chaos. After more than a year of living under the repressive, violent, new Chilean government, Allende, with her husband, went into exile in Venezuela.
In 1981, Allende learned that her grandfather, who was almost one hundred years old and still living in Chile, was near death. She began to write her recollections of her early family life in Chile, a chronicle that she ultimately transformed into the magic-realist fiction of The House of the Spirits (1982), her first novel and an international bestseller.
The need to tell stories is an important theme in all of Allende’s works. In her second novel, Of Love and Shadows (1984), Allende created a main character who, like herself, is a journalist, a reporter of stories. Her next protagonist, Eva Luna, is also a teller of tales, acting as a kind of modern-day Scheherazade in the novel Eva Luna (1988) and the collection The Stories of Eva Luna (1991).
Allende’s recent works include Paula (1995), a critically acclaimed memoir written in honor of her terminally ill daughter, Daughter of Fortune: A Novel (1999), and City of Beasts (2002), a young adult novel.
