Isabel Allende has been a literary legend for more than four decades.
The novelist made a living with words before she turned her attention to fiction. Allende worked as a journalist in Chile until she was forced to leave the country two years after the 1973 military coup that led to the suicide of her cousin, Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the installation of Gen. Augusto Pinochet as the dictator of the nation. She continued her work as a reporter while in exile in Venezuela.
While in that country, Allende began writing “The House of the Spirits,” which follows four generations of a family in an unnamed country much like Chile. The novel was originally published in Spain in 1982, and quickly became an international bestseller, making Allende one of the most talked-about authors of the era.
She would go on to write more than 20 works of fiction, including “Of Love and Shadows,” “Zorro,” and “The Japanese Lover,” as well as several works of nonfiction and a children’s book, “Perla the Mighty Dog.” She also founded the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996 in honor of her late daughter, Paula Frías; the foundation invests “in the power of women and girls to secure reproductive rights, economic independence and freedom from violence.”
Allende’s longtime feminism is evident in her latest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle,” published May 6 by Ballantine. The book tells the story of the title character, the fiercely independent American-born daughter of an Irish nun and a Chilean aristocrat, who convinces a newspaper editor to send her to Chile to cover the nation’s Civil War of 1891. While in Chile, she falls in love with another reporter, Eric Whelan, and meets her long-lost father.
Allende talked about her new novel via telephone from her home in northern California. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did the character of Emilia arrive to you?
It all started with the [1891] Civil War in Chile. I was interested in that event because it echoes what happened 80 years later in Chile, with a military coup in both cases. In the first case, it was a civil war, and in the second case, it was a military coup, but there are a lot of similarities. I started researching the Civil War, and then I thought, “I want to tell this story from a neutral point of view. I don’t want it to be on either side of the conflict.” So I thought my narrator would be a foreigner, probably, and then one thing after another led me to the idea of having a woman journalist from California.
Q: What interested you about the Chilean Civil War of 1891?
In the months of battle during the Civil War, more Chileans died than in four years of the War of the Pacific [in 1879-1884], which was against Peru and Bolivia, and they killed each other in the most brutal way. It reminded me of what happened later [in the 1973 Chilean coup], because in both cases, it was a progressive visionary president who wanted to make changes, especially to empower the poor people. In both cases, they had the opposition of the conservatives, and eventually, the military intervened. In 1891, the military split, and that’s why we had a civil war. But in 1973, all the armed forces were against the government. In both instances, the president committed suicide.
Q: Like Emelia, you worked as a journalist. Did you find that your background in journalism helped you when you first started writing fiction?
Of course. I learned everything in journalism, how to conduct an interview, how to research and check the research of more than one source, how to use language to make it efficient so that you chop your reader by the neck in the first few lines and don’t let the reader go until the very end.
Q: When you started writing the book, did you know that that was the profession you wanted Emilia to have?
Well, what else could it be? I needed someone who would go to report the war. There were very few women journalists at the time, and they were not war correspondents for sure, but I thought I would have to create a character that would have a very good reason to go to the civil war in Chile. So probably she has roots there. That’s how I came up with the idea for Emilia to be an illegitimate child of a Chilean man that is passing through San Francisco and has this child and never cares for her at all. She speaks Spanish because she lives in the Mission, which is at the time the only Mexican neighborhood in San Francisco. She has a Mexican stepfather, so she speaks Spanish. When she tells the newspaper that she’s the right person to report the war, she has these two things: She speaks Spanish and she has roots in the country.
Q: What kind of research did you do while you were writing this novel?
I didn’t know much [at first], but I knew that it had happened and that President [José Manuel Balmaceda] had committed suicide. That’s all I knew. But my brother, Juan, who is a scholar, now retired, helped me with the research. He sent me so much material that I was just drowning in links, documents, books, you name it. The research is there, but it shouldn’t show in the book. It’s like the dancer who leaps across the stage. You don’t want to know how much training there is behind it. You just want to see the dancer leaping. It’s the same with research for a novel. You want to have all the background, but it doesn’t have to show.
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Q: What do you think leads Emilia to strive for more and to challenge the gender roles of that era?
It was the beginning of a women’s liberation movement, but the word feminism didn’t exist yet. I wanted her to be educated, and that’s what the stepfather does. The stepfather tells her, “You are more intelligent than everybody else. You can do whatever you want. No one can put you down.” At one point, the mother says, “She cannot do that. No women are journalists. She will have to do 10 times the effort of any man to get any recognition.” And the stepfather says, “Yes, she can do that.” He gives her that self-confidence, which in a way I think I had when I was a child, somehow I got it in me that I wanted to be financially independent. I must have been 6 years old, and when I was asked, “What would you like to be when you grow up?”, my answer would be, “I want to support myself.” That’s all I wanted, because if you cannot do that, there’s no independence.
Q: Do you have any message for young women, young feminists especially, who might be getting discouraged by what’s happening in the world these days?
I have a book called “The Soul of a Woman,” which is about feminism and how I have experienced it. What I keep telling young women is that a woman alone is very vulnerable. Women together are invincible. So you have to be connected and informed and realize that all what your mothers and grandmothers have gained through incredible struggle, you may lose it in 24 hours. You have to be always vigilant and alert and keep going because this is just the beginning of a very long struggle. Patriarchy has been here for thousands of years. To change the patriarchy for a better way of living will take a long time, and there will be backlash. We have to just keep going,
Q: Would you say that you’re optimistic about the field of journalism as it’s under threat from a lot of quarters?
I have lived through this before. When we had the military coup in Chile, the first thing that happened on the first day was censorship of the press. They closed and eliminated newspapers, radio, TV programs; I had a TV program that was canceled. Immediate censorship is there to control public opinion, and any authoritarian government will try to do that. Teachers and professors are also targeted because they form the minds of the young. This can happen for a very long time, but eventually the truth comes out; eventually, things change. I am 82 years old, I have seen everything, and I know that there are cycles. Things seem really bad. You think that you cannot get out of this, it’s going to get worse probably, but we will get out of it. Don’t give up.
