Category Women’s Writing
A note on the other (Spanish) North and South in Mrs Gaskell’s North and South (1855)
So I was enjoying my annual appointment with the BBC series North and South (2004), based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 novel of the same name and starring (oh joy!) Richard Armitage as John Thornton (left) and poor Daniela Denby-Ashe, excised from this version of the DVD cover (because the BBC are nothing if not pragmatic in […]
Anglo-Spanish Edwardians (An occasional series) | 1: Leticia ‘Lily’ Higgin, 1837-1913
The research for my current book, The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession, has turned up dozens of long-forgotten writers, commentators and artists who in their different ways, shaped the modern British view of Spain. Many of them were of Anglo-Spanish origin or had family connections that placed them at the heart […]
Newsflash! Free excerpts of María Dueñas’s new novel, Misión olvido, take over the web. How many can you find?
Remember Spain’s mega-blockbuster El tiempo entre costuras? Of course you do. It’s been inescapable in Spain for the last couple of years. I even reviewed the English translation over at Books4Spain, although I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the TV series yet. And its author, María Dueñas, hasn’t been slacking. Her second novel Misión olvido (Mission: Oblivion) […]
Holiday Reading (2): On not reviewing Clare Clark’s “Beautiful Lies”, or, the stranger-than-fiction lives of Gabriela and Robert Cunninghame Graham
So, back to The Holiday. As I think I might just possibly have mentioned before, the major priorities for the week, other than a touch of sightseeing and a generous sampling of sack, were swimming and reading, reading and swimming, swimming, reading, and swimming some more. And as you can see (left), the conditions were […]
Esther Tusquets (1936-2012): Ground-breaking Catalan/Spanish Writer and Publisher
I have just seen the very sad news that the ground-breaking writer and publisher Esther Tusquets has died in Barcelona at the age of 75. Tusquets was born a month after the start of the Spanish Civil War, and her earliest memories, as recounted in her first volume of autobiography Habíamos ganado la guerra (We had won […]
This is not a review of Inma Chacon’s Tiempo de arena (runner-up, Premio Planeta 2011)
This was going to be a review of Tiempo de arena [Time of Sand], by Inma Chacón (above), which I picked up in Tenerife airport a couple of weeks ago and have been gripped by ever since. And then I finished the novel and did a bit of googling and discovered that it’s a sequel! A secret sequel! […]
Helen Forrester (1919-2011), author of The Liverpool Basque, has died
I was very sad to hear today that Helen Forrester, author of the wonderful 1993 novel The Liverpool Basque, has died at the age of 92. . Of course, The Liverpool Basque isn’t among Forrester’s best-known works- in fact, this vivid and emotional hymn to a vanished community is rarely mentioned in accounts of her career. She made […]
Book Review | Lucas Malet’s ‘The Far Horizon’ (1907), or, the Twilight Renaissance of an Edwardian Bachelor
One of the perks of researching a new project – in this case, From Cervantes to Sunny Spain – is that until you actually nail down the final structure, pretty much anything can count as research. And so, aided by my newly-beloved Kindle, I’ve been splashing around in the balmy waters of late Victorian and […]
Un coup de foudre littéraire, or, My First Week With the Kindle
So I’m going to be travelling a lot over the next four months – three or four work trips to Spain and two to the US. And as you know, I love to read. I have a long history of schlepping piles of books across international borders (you have to take a lot because you […]
Books on Spain 2.0 | Rants, Reviews and a new book-in-progress
First up, thank you everybody for the lovely comments on my blogiversary post! Of course, I wrote it and promptly went off on holiday, hence this belated acknowledgment- but now I’m back and raring to get started on the next 12 months of rants and reviews. From September, this blog will also be home to updates […]
Books on Spain is One Year (and a few days…) Old!
Goodness gracious me, but I appear to have let the Very Important Anniversary of my first-ever post here at Books on Spain pass me by. How remiss! So, let’s pretend it’s last Wednesday, and this is my one-year blogiversary post. A year ago, I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep this up for […]
Summer Reading Marathon: Maria Duenas’s EL TIEMPO ENTRE COSTURAS, or, the ultimate in mid-career academic self-reinvention
Ready … get set …. read! Now I’ve recovered from the marathon that was Julia Navarro’s Dime quien soy, and after a couple of months devoted largely to trashy Edwardian fiction, I’m finally ready to begin the next Project Bestseller marathon read. As promised, my next big Spanish bestseller is María Dueñas’s El tiempo entre costuras (The Time Between Seams). […]
Mapblogging, or, on the trail of Edwardian lady travellers in Coruña
So I’m in A Coruña for work, I have a free weekend, and I had this great idea: to figure out what the Edwardian lady travellers I’m currently researching saw while they were here in 1908 (Annette Meakin) and 1910 (Catherine Gasquoine Hartley), and to figure out how many of those things are still recognisable today. […]
Trashy Edwardian novelists do Spain, or, castles, jewels, harlots, and those damn Tourists
Spain has been a mainstay of the Anglophone literary imagination for at least two centuries. Most of us are all too familiar with the main co-ordinates of a literary landscape that began (in its modern version at least) with the Romantics and is still in circulation today: Andalusia and the south, Carmen, Don Quixote, bullfighting, sangria, sun, sea, orange […]
Review (finally!) | Julia Navarro’s DIME QUIEN SOY
So I finished it. A couple of weeks ago now, actually. I made it through all 1097 pages of Julia Navarro’s epic bestselling novel Dime quién soy (Tell me who I am; Plaza y Janés, 2010) and ever since I have been trying to figure out what to write in this review. See, it’s not that I […]
Announcement! Books on Spain Marathon: DIME QUIEN SOY
It’s true! After buying Julia Navarro’s bestselling monster novel Dime quién soy (Tell me who I am) on my last trip to Spain, and lugging all 1100 pages of the giant hardback across Spain and through the Pennines on my unscheduled diversion via Doncaster (blame the December snows), I have *finally* cracked it open today […]
Review | The Olive Groves of Belchite | Elena Moya Pereira
How are the reverberations of an event like the Spanish Civil War transformed as they travel down through the generations? How do they echo through people’s choices, actions, lives and loves, and what happens to those echoes when the walls they are bouncing off are far, far away from those that hold the first-hand memories? These […]
Gopegui in English at last – review roundup!
I’m still here! Just been reading some great reviews of Belén Gopegui’s first novel, from 1993: La escala de los mapas / The Scale of Maps, in its new English translation by Mark Schafer, published by City Lights (I was at college with a Mark Schafer; I wonder if it’s the same one? He was studying […]
And a followup, or, stop moaning, start shouting: 10 contemporary Spanish women writers to watch
And so, to follow up on the previous post and take up Vida’s challenge to do something about the fact that ‘the numbers of articles and reviews simply don’t reflect how many women are actually writing‘, here are my suggestions for 10 contemporary Spanish women fiction writers to watch. I’m not claiming they’re the ‘best’ […]
So it’s not just Spain … international rumpus on the vanishing of female authors and critics
Anybody who reads here regularly will know that one of my biggest issues with the Hispanic literary world is the regular erasure of women’s works and women’s voices from the general literary conversation (for examples, see here, here or here). But guess what? It’s not just Spain! There’s an almighty rumpus kicking off in the blogosphere and in […]
Books on Spain 