Rosa Chacel

Rosa Chacel (born June 3, 1898, Valladolid, Spain—died July 27, 1994, Madrid) was a leading mid-20th-century Spanish woman novelist and an accomplished essayist and poet who, as a member of the Generation of 1927, balanced her dense narrative style with surrealist imagery and psychological insights.

Chacel studied painting and sculpture in Madrid, but ill health forced her to quit school in 1918. In 1922 she and her husband, the painter Timoteo Pérez Rubio, moved to Rome, where Chacel taught at the Spanish Academy and wrote her first novel, Estación, ida y vuelta (1930; “Station, Round Trip”), influenced by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After returning to Spain in 1927, she wrote a volume of sonnets, A la orilla de un pozo (1936; “At the Well’s Edge”), published in English as A Translation and Interpretation of Rosa Chacel’s Sonnets: A la orilla de un pozo/At the Edge of a Well (2001). During the Spanish Civil War, she took her son to France, while Pérez Rubio stayed in Madrid to assist in the rescue of the Prado Museum art collection from the wartime violence. The family went into exile in South America in 1940. There Chacel published little of the poetry she wrote but continued to release essays, short stories, and novels, notably Memorias de Leticia Valle (1945; Memoirs of Leticia Valle), in the form of a young girl’s coming-of-age diary, and La sinrazón (1960; “Without Reason”), the diary of a young man’s quest for life values and meaning. She settled permanently in Spain after her husband’s death in 1977. A trilogy including Barrio de Maravillas (1976; The Maravillas District), Acrópolis (1984), and Ciencias naturales (1988; “Natural Sciences”) relates the story of two girls of Chacel’s generation as they mature into women. Among her later writings are essays, two autobiographical works, a book-length study of her husband’s paintings, and the verse collection Poesia (1931–1991) (1992). Chacel won the National Award for Spanish Letters and shortly before her death received the gold Medal for Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos I.