Toward the Next Century of Carmen Martín Gaite

My first spark of interest in Carmen Martín Gaite’s work happened when I was a graduate student in Madrid, when I had the privilege of reading The Back Room in a class with one of the most esteemed of Martín Gaite scholars, José Teruel. El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room) was one of the first—if not the very first—Spanish novel to look back at the post–Spanish Civil War era through the lens of Franco’s death in 1975, and it did so in a highly personalized way. The protagonist, C. (as in “Carmen”—the author), narrates from the literal “back room” of her childhood home, which was converted in wartime from the playroom to a pantry—but also from the metaphorical “back room” of her mind, full of memories, anticipation about the future, and ideas for literary manuscripts. This theme and this stylistic approach—a blend of early historical memory and autobiographical details common in other Martín Gaite works—cued the arrival of something wholly new on the Spanish landscape and appealed to readers across the world.

Back in José Teruel’s class in the early 1990s, this erudite literary critic was already contextualizing the great Martín Gaite’s works through an examination of her literary generation, known variously as the Mid-Century Generation, the Generation of 1950, the “Children of the War,” and “The Lost Children.” Teruel was the perfect person to write a biography of Martín Gaite, combining literary studies, archival research, multiple editions of critically significant Spanish writers, and examination of epistolary production and traditions in this generation. Carmen Martín Gaite. Una biografía won Spain’s coveted Comillas Prize for History, Biography, and Memoir. The biography is a treasure trove of stories about Martín Gaite’s fascinating life, little-known information about her literary generation, and critical inquiries into her written works. Teruel characterizes Martín Gaite as a person who lived at a difficult time in the nation’s history and in challenging circumstances of her own but knew how to face things, whether through her natural curiosity about life or through her defense of each person’s right to “a little portion of happiness” (“una ración de alegría”).

Reading Teruel’s biography feels like you’re taking an engaging, high-level seminar, and also like you’re sitting down for tapas and wine with him as he regales you with story after story of the author’s shining but complicated life. He moves easily between and among authors and genres of the post-1939 period and supplies concrete, fascinating details of the influence of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime on Martín Gaite’s family (chapter 2, for example, recalls Martín Gaite’s mention in The Back Room of her Uncle Joaquín being shot by Franco’s troops “for being socialist.”) A striking episode is Teruel’s excavation of a story about Martín Gaite’s progressive father, José Martín López. Her father professed and exercised—in both formal settings and the home, with his wife and two daughters—a sincere feminism that advocated for equal rights, especially in educational realms. This shows Martín Gaite’s unusual path during the Franco era: pursuing the highest levels of education, studying abroad, wrestling with her relationship with her literary generation, and writing prolifically and always on her own terms.

Teruel’s own bibliography tells a story of deep engagement with Spanish literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is an award-winning poet who has written hundreds of articles and book chapters on the literary icons of his time and his parents’ time. In addition, he has published numerous editions of these authors’ literary works, including Carmen Martín Gaite’s Complete Works, single editions of many of her works (including El cuarto de atrás and her poetry collection, A rachas), and compilations of her essays (Tirando del hilo), conference talks (De viva voz. Conferencias, 2023), short stories (Todos los cuentos, 2019), and correspondence (El valor de las cartas en el tiempo, 2023). In fact, Teruel’s archival, curatorial, and editorial work can be viewed as a giant, generous gesture for the world to know Martín Gaite in all her great diversity of approaches and for critics to explore more of her oeuvre.

The biography itself has something of a Martín Gaite “feel,” in that it iterates and reiterates the most significant themes of the author’s life and writings through its chronological focus on her works and their sociohistorical context. Photos, abundant and detailed chapter notes, and a fascinating variety of quotes and anecdotes enrich Teruel’s profoundly literary and deeply readable tale.

Martín Gaite is the kind of author who pulls the reader into a vivid narrative world, laden with layered, complex characters and linguistic play. She takes pride in making narrative out of historical essay and adding ingredients of the historical essay to other genres. You enter her world and immediately start a journey of quixotic wonderings: What is more real, the story you’re reading or your own existence? Where does the narrative end and the author’s life begin? How is it possible to plumb the depths of a character’s deep doubts while keeping the story moving, engaging, even thrilling?

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The year 2025 marked the centennial of Martín Gaite’s birth and the quarter century since her death. Celebrations of Martín Gaite’s life and works took place at New York and Guadalajara’s Feria Internacional del Libro, the University of Zurich, and Madrid’s Instituto Cervantes and the Matadero (among several other international venues). The pinnacle celebration was held in October in Salamanca, Martín Gaite’s birthplace.

Affectionately known as “Carmiña” to friends, family members, and many readers, Martín Gaite chronicled—through prolific publications in fiction and nonfiction—life during Spain’s Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and transition to democracy. As a young writer, Martín Gaite won the 1954 Café Gijón Prize for her novel El balneario (The Spa) and soon thereafter won the 1957 Nadal Prize for her Salamanca-based novel Entre visillos (Behind the Curtains, translated into English in 1990), bringing her great renown as a novelist. Martín Gaite’s 1978 novel, El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room, translated into English by Helen R. Lane and published by Columbia University Press in 1983) catapulted her to international fame. Martín Gaite blurred boundaries between and among genres and continued to receive prizes and recognition for her historical research, sociological essays, literary reviews, poetry, plays, and even television scripts, all above and beyond her novels and short stories. She continued writing and publishing until her death in 2000.

Twenty-five years after Martín Gaite’s death, Teruel’s long-awaited biography offers a unique lens through which to understand her life: that of José Teruel’s decades-long relationship with the author and all of her works, which results in an extraordinarily profound and textured portrait of Martín Gaite: all her successes and challenges, her exploration and mastery of one literary genre after another, and the context of a life lived under dictatorship, then democracy.

The centennial of “Carmiña” and her biography in particular remind us why a life of letters matters so much.

Spanish-language readers can choose to spend several very intriguing years reading Martín Gaite’s Complete Works (Obras completas, edited by José Teruel Benavente, 2008–2019) in seven volumes: two of her novels; one of her short stories, poetry, and dramatic works; three of her essays; and one of miscellaneous writings. An unfortunately less complete collection is available to English-language readers, but this audience can access several other Martín Gaite works in English translation, including her Nadal Prize novel, Behind the Curtains; her blockbuster 1978 novel, The Back Room (winner of Spain’s National Literature Prize of the same year); and her suite of 1990s novels, Variable Cloud (Nubosidad variable, 1992; translated into English in 1995), The Farewell Stranger (La Reina de las Nieves, 1994, translated into English in 1999), and Living’s the Strange Thing (Lo raro es vivir, 1996, translated into English in 2004). The crescendo of English translations, published in both the United Kingdom and the United States, is a healthy indicator of Martín Gaite’s ever-growing critical and popular acclaim as she approached her 75th birthday in 2000.

Hispanic studies scholar and close friend of Martín Gaite Joan L. Brown addressed this publication flurry in her 2021 book, Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite (Bucknell University Press, 2021), in which she places Martín Gaite’s later novels in the context of her career and offers a clear and thorough analysis of this complex author’s literary style. Brown rightly insists that “All six novels demonstrate the power of a mature author who knows how to capture—and hold—the reader’s attention.” Brown emphasizes the capacity of The Farewell Angel to portray Leonardo Villalba, a protagonist who seems to have so much going for him but succumbs to heroin use, thus “shed[ding] light on the Transition and the lost generation of young people left in its wake.” Martín Gaite takes this question on with a “historian’s eye” and treats the issue with utmost care, given that the fictional Villalba’s trajectory resembles that of Martín Gaite’s own daughter, Marta. Brown again underscores Martín Gaite’s daring themes and unique style in Living’s the Strange Thing, highlighting the author’s grappling with her nation’s dictatorship amnesia and entry into an important historical memory phase, while also citing her “verbal dexterity” and use of autobiographical elements.

Given the evident enormous interest Martín Gaite has generated among North American critics, especially since 1978, it is surprising that her 1990 Caperucita en Manhattan has not yet been translated into English. In the biography’s final chapter, “Una escritura de supervivencia” (Survival writing), Teruel mentions Martín Gaite’s renown, especially her 1987 Anagrama Essay Prize, the 1988 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 1991 Castilla y León Literature Prize, and Spain’s 1994 National Prize for Literature as key celebratory moments in her literary career. Teruel emphasizes Martín Gaite’s success with popular readers, as even her nonfiction essay Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain became a bestseller (as did the 1990 novel Caperucita en Manhattan). This prolific late-in-life literary production was hard won, as Martín Gaite mourned the too-early death of her daughter, Marta, in 1985.

In chapter 11 of the biography, Teruel poignantly states,

“Si acudir a los archivos o a la hemeroteca suponía para Carmiña un ejercicio de olvido, por el contrario, sumergirse en la ficción le exigía un gran esfuerzo de entrada en sí misma, de ‘pesquisa’ personal (auténtico leitmotiv de su obra novelística). Martín Gaite como novelista cosía la verdad con hilos de mentira o siguiendo el poema de Marianne Moore (“I, too, dislike it …”) creaba jardines imaginarios, pero habitados por sapos de verdad”

(While working in the archives or periodical libraries was for Carmiña an exercise in forgetting, diving back into fiction required a great effort on her part, for she had to reinitiate a kind of self-questioning [a leitmotif of her novelistic production in general]. The novelist Martín Gaite sewed together the truth with little narrative lies, or, in the context of a Marianne Moore poem [‘I, too, dislike it …’], she created imaginary gardens that were inhabited by real toads”).

In Calila, Joan L. Brown includes a letter to her from Martín Gaite in which the author invokes the need for “un huerto en una ciudad imaginaria” (a garden in an imaginary city [frontispiece]), evidence that “Calila’s” real and imaginary worlds, her “gardens,” crisscrossed in highly relevant and poetic ways.

As I have read more and more of Martín Gaite’s works over the years, I have been struck by her innovative style, which incorporates her profound knowledge of the international literary landscape in all genres. Martín Gaite translated such well-known authors as Emily Brontë, Gustave Flaubert, Natalia Ginzburg, C. S. Lewis, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Carlos Williams, and Virginia Woolf and served as literary critic for Diario 16 from 1976 to 1980. Her own writings all demonstrate skilled experimentation between and among literary genres, sophisticated inversions of topical approaches (fairy tales and mystery novels, for example), and a uniquely and extraordinarily playful way with language and themes.

Most intriguing and sustaining in my readings of Martín Gaite have been three long threads that connect each of her works to the next: a concern for the portrayal of girl and women characters and the societal norms that influence them; a dialogic interest in her reading public—both within the works themselves, in a metaliterary way, and in the “real world” (which Martín Gaite might not overly distinguish from literature); and a trend-setting obsession with blurring artificial boundaries between and among literary genres. The first thread is the subject of my first monograph, The “Strange Girl” in Twentieth-Century Spanish Novels Written by Women (2004), and of many other critical studies from the 1990s and 2000s. The second reminds me vividly of my interaction with Martín Gaite at the Madrid Book Fair in 1998, when she generously tendered her phone number and said we could talk more.

The last thread is one of the focal points of Teruel’s biography, in which he dazzlingly links Martín Gaite works across different time periods and genres. In an examination of her writings from the 1960s, Teruel names many of the philosophical questions that would occupy the author for the remainder of her life, including how an individual’s personality develops in a given sociohistorical context, how people struggle with power and dependence on others, the need to tell a story and to find (or create) apt listeners (or “interlocutors”), and the balance between complex thought and everyday life. Teruel summarizes several of Martín Gaite’s own narrative theories from El cuento de nunca acabar:

Y, dentro de los cauces narrativos que su ensayismo adopta, manifestó en múltiples ocasiones su aspiración al parecido con el relato oral, donde ni se lleva un programa previo ni están prohibidos los vericuetos, lo que presupone una actitud de perder el miedo al extravío, como leemos en el último de los siete prólogos.

(And, within the narrative modes she adopts in her nonfiction essays, you can perceive her desire to make the work sound like an oral tale, without a fixed plan or a prohibition on detours. This assumes an ability to lose the fear of meandering, as we read in the last of these seven prologues).

I find myself constantly recommending Martín Gaite’s works to friends, family members, and fellow literary critics and wishing that all her writings were available in English to appeal to a broader reading audience. Several decades into my study, I still return to her work with new wonder, finding gems I haven’t read before or reading an older piece with older eyes.

One example is El libro de la fiebre (The Book of Fever), written in 1949, after the author’s months-long bout with typhus (but published in its entirety for the first time in Maria Vittoria Calvi’s Cátedra edition in 2007). Teruel sees this unusual hybrid work as an early indicator of the ways Martín Gaite would play with themes and techniques of “narrative, love, and lies” throughout her writing career. I had read the 2007 edition but then returned to it after experiencing my own grave, long-lasting fever in late 2022–early 2023. The fantastical reimaginings of Martín Gaite’s months of fever and the linguistic play between and among states of waking, sleep, and dream paralleled my own experiences, allowing me to rework my own relationship to illness and health and generating a renewed connection to a younger Martín Gaite.

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The centennial of “Carmiña” and her biography in particular remind us why a life of letters matters so much. In Martín Gaite’s case, a literary genius remained in Fascist Franco Spain, navigating her own career ambitions and literary predilections while creating new, hybrid cartographies of literary genres and a fluid movement from fiction to nonfiction and back.

Despite (and perhaps due to) the well-documented censorship, especially of the early Franco regime, Martín Gaite brought her readers behind the curtains, to the window, around to the back room: all those important prepositional phrases that speak to a shadowy world into which a creative writer was able to bring so much light.

As Itzíar López Guil and Chiara Licci say, using classic Martín Gaite rhetoric, the author helps us to access “a crack in the wall” (una ranura en la muralla).¹ José Teruel’s biography allows Spanish-language readers to break through the wall, while Brown’s Calila and the available English translations of Martín Gaite’s work are an excellent start to a reading experience full of wonder.