María Luisa Bombal (1910-1980) was a Chilean novelist and story writer, one of the first to break away from the realistic tradition in Latin America.

María Luisa Bombal was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, on June 8, 1910. Her father was an Argentine of French origin and her mother was of German extraction. In 1923, on the death of her father, María Luisa journeyed to Paris with her mother and two sisters, and there spent her adolescent years. She came to adopt French as her own tongue and wrote her first literary pieces in that language. Perhaps this explains in part why her style is so clear, in the French manner, stripped of superfluous material, unlike the traditional Spanish prose style heavy with rhetoric.

Bombal graduated from the University of the Sorbonne in Paris with a thesis on the 19th century French...