SOURCE: “Antithetical Mirror Images and the Poetic Imagination in the Narrative of María Luisa Bombal,” in The Lyrical Vision of María Luisa Bombal, Tamesis Books Limited, 1988, pp. 69-78.

In the following essay, the critic discusses recurring images in Bombal's novellas and stories that serve to portray the futile state of her women protagonists.

Imagination is a strong, restless faculty. When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

Charlotte Brontë, in a letter to George Henry Lewes¹

The desire to translate and to render artistically her inner fantasies and thoughts into the written word is not a novel experience for the literary woman. However, as Charlotte Brontë's questions clearly imply, fiction was not always considered...