by Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende was born in 1946 to Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomat, and Francisca (Llona Barros) Allende. Twenty-seven years later her uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende, died in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. The House of the Spirits was partly a response to this traumatic event: “I think,” observed Allende, who had worked in Chile as a journalist, “I have divided my life [into] before that day and after that day” (Allende in Chapman and Dear, p. 14). As a young girl Allende had lived in Chile’s capital, Santiago, with her maternal grandparents—a conservative, violent, but endearing grandfather and a spiritualist grandmother whose stories served as Allende’s introduction to her family’s and her country’s past.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Mining for prosperity. In the early...