Kelly Winters is a freelance writer and has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses feminist themes in The House of the Spirits .

"Critics are terrible people," Allende told Farhat Iftekharuddin in Conversations with Isabel Allende. "They will label you no matter what, and you have to be classified. I don't want to be called a feminist writer, a political writer, a social writer, a magic realism writer, or a Latin-American writer. I am just a writer; I am a storyteller."

Despite her objections to being categorized, Allende is a feminist, as she made clear in the same interview. She told Iftekharuddin, "Because I am a woman and because I am an intelligent women, excuse my arrogance, I have to be a feminist. I am aware of my gender; I am aware of the fact that being a...