“They were paid miserable salaries and slept in basic quarters in the backyard,” she says. “They made all the decisions they came and went as they pleased.” Allende remembers the maids in the house as very humble women who had no life at all. “The house became exclusively ruled by my grandfather and his bachelor sons,” she says. “She had no resources and no money she was a charity case in her father’s house.” Allende’s grandmother had some say in household and family matters, but when she died, any authority she had as a woman died with her. “Her husband, a Chilean diplomat, abandoned her in Peru with two toddlers and a newborn, and she was forced to return to her parents’ home in Chile,” she explains. “It’s a reflection of my feminist storyline through my own personal history.” The non-fiction book intersects Allende’s past with social, cultural, and political prose, giving personal insight into how much-and how little-has changed for women in her lifetime.Īllende believes that her rebellion against male authority started with her mother. The Soul of a Woman (out March 2 from Ballantine Books) can best be described as a meditation of sorts, Allende says. Isabel Allende receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in November of 2014. “I found myself writing but I didn’t know what it was-it isn’t quite a memoir and it isn’t quite a feminist manifesto.” Allende’s notes began to evolve into the makings of a book. Allende’s own crusade has taken her to the White House, where in 2014 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama. “I started taking notes about what my own trajectory has been.”Ĭonsidered one of the world’s most influential Latina authors, Allende’s novels often center around passionate women who dare to break through the confines of patriarchy and oppression, usually in magical-realist settings.

“Feminism has been a guiding light in my work, my writing, and in the way I conduct my life,” says the 78-year-old Chilean-American author of novels such as The House of the Spirits(also the basis of the 1993 film of the same name starring Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder) from her home in Marin County, California. “So I told them, ‘No, we’re not going to do this.’”īut it got Allende thinking about what the movement has meant to her personally over the course of her lifetime. “It sounded so dated because so much has happened relating to the movement since that time: #MeToo, the Women’s March, LGBTQ+ progression, and more recently with Black Lives Matter,” she says. “Some time later, my editors decided they wanted to print the speech into a booklet.” When she read it, Allende was less than impressed. “In March 2013, I was in Mexico for a women’s conference and I did a speech on feminism that went viral,” she says. Isabel Allende never thought she would count herself in the group of wave-making women protagonists she’s used to writing about.

Book paula isabel allende