by Isabel Allende

Born in 1946, the novelist Isabel Allende, goddaughter and niece to Chile's future president Salvador Allende, was raised in the lavish home of her grandparents in Chile's capital city, Santiago. Her grandfather-described as a conservative and passionately violent yet endearing old patriarch-came of marriageable age in the early 1900s, when her novel The House of the Spirits opens.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Chile in the early 1900s. From the 1890s to 1920, Chile experienced a great rise in prosperity as a result of a boom in the copper and nitrates mines of its northern deserts. Mining was one of the few ways a poor man could make a fortune in the country, as the character Esteban Trueba sets out to do in The House of the Spirits. It was possible for tough, hardworking...