The Stories of Eva Luna Study Guide

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru in 1942. Her father, Tomás Allende, was a Chilean diplomat stationed in Peru at the time. After her parents annulled their marriage in 1945, Isabel spent most of her childhood either with her mother and stepfather in Santiago or at private schools in Bolivia and Lebanon. After graduation, she worked for the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization until 1967, when she co-founded and began writing for Chile’s first feminist magazine, Paula. Meanwhile on the political stage, Salvador Allende—Isabel’s father’s cousin—was democratically elected as Chile’s first socialist president in 1970. Three years later, Augusto Pinochet staged a military coup, overthrowing Salvador Allende and making members of the Allende family living in Chile targets of the new administration. Allende continued trying to work in journalism for several years, but growing increasingly frustrated by suppression of the press, she fled to Venezuela in 1975. In 1981, news of her grandfather’s impending death inspired Allende to start writing The House of the Spirits, the book that would become her breakout novel upon its publication in 1982. Throughout the 80s, Allende continued to write novels, and her first works began to reach international audiences in translation. In 1988, Allende married American Willie Gordon, and they began living in California together. Shortly thereafter, she became an American citizen. After the death of Isabel’s daughter from her first marriage, Paula, in 1992, Allende grew increasingly involved with philanthropy (with a particular emphasis on causes affecting women and girls in developing countries). In 1996, she launched the Isabel Allende foundation in Paula’s honor. Throughout the 21st century, Allende continued to publish novels and won numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014) and the National Book Award (2018). She has received 15 honorary doctorate degrees. In 2019 she remarried to Roger Cukras, with whom she currently lives in California.

The 1973 Chilean coup d’etat looms in the background of The Stories of Eva Luna (as well as most of Isabel Allende’s other writings). Many of the men who abuse their power, suppress dissension, and trod upon the vulnerable in Allende’s stories have a few things in common with Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who overthrew the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s cousin) and ruled Chile for 17 years. Over the course of his reign, Pinochet murdered, executed, tortured, and/or disappeared tens of thousands of his political opponents. The rape of women detained in his prison camps was commonplace. During the initial coup, Salvador Allende died. Whether he died by suicide or was murdered by Pinochet’s regime is undetermined. Although The Stories of Eva Luna are set in a smattering of unnamed South American countries, Allende takes particular inspiration from the history of women’s rights in Chile. The systemic obstacles that women face in her stories reflect some of the real-life historical events that have affected women’s rights to vote, own property, and so on. Women in Chile gained full suffrage in 1949, but they lost the right to vote under the Pinochet dictatorship. Chile’s largely Catholic population has also heavily influenced social conservatism and attitudes toward women’s rights and gender roles. As of 2004, however, divorce is legal in Chile—and in the same year, the legal age cutoff for statutory rape rose from 12 to 14.

The Stories of Eva Luna is a spinoff of Isabel Allende’s critically acclaimed 1987 novel Eva Luna, which follows the titular narrator through decades of her life as she grows into her vocation as a storyteller. Some of that time is spent in Agua Santa, where Eva meets characters like Riad Halabí for the first time. Allende is perhaps best known for The House of the Spirits (1982), the novel that launched her into literary stardom. Allende cites some of her own influences as the authors of the Latin American Boom, the literary movement that directly precedes her own work. Among the best-known works of that era are Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World (1981). The growing popularity of Latin American literature for an international audience at this time also brought works like Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones (1944), another Allende influence, to a wider readership. In 1973, when Allende was still working as a journalist in Chile, the poet and Communist politician Pablo Neruda urged her to write novels instead. Neruda, widely regarded as the greatest Chilean poet of all time, wrote collections such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) or Marcela Serrano’s novel Diez Mujeres (2011) (published in English as Ten Women in 2016) are more recently published short-story collections that explore similar themes to The Stories of Eva Luna.