Introduction

The House of the Spirits, the first novel by Isabel Allende, was published in Spanish in 1982; an English translation appeared in 1985. The novel is set in Chile and tells the saga of the Trueba family through three generations in the twentieth century. The narrative starts in the early 1900s and ends a year after the 1973 coup d'état that ended the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende's uncle, and installed a military dictatorship that lasted through 1989.

Allende approaches the theme of war and peace in relation to the political divisiveness that gripped the country in the years following World War II. These divisions originated in the economic gap between the landowning elite and the working classes, and were aggravated by the violent military coup d'état. The coup, led...