Carmen Laforet

A pioneering novel of feminist literature. 

During the first decades of the Franco regime, women’s lives were marked out for them and only marriage could free them from parental authority, the moment when their husbands took control. This is the case of Paulina until she decides to take full charge of her own life and emancipate herself from all male dependency. At the age of 30, she decides to separate from her husband, break up with her lover and make a fresh start in Madrid, with a child under her wing. Only thanks to her resolute spirituality, which finds echoes in the asceticism of the mystics, does Paulina achieve the liberation that enables her to become “a new woman”, flouting the times she is forced to live in.

At the age of 23 Carmen Laforet dazzled the critics and public with Nada, now considered a universal classic. A decade later she wrote The New Woman, a moving novel that was not understood at the time owing to its pioneering portrait of feminism, nor later with the arrival of democracy because of its religious content. Ahead of its times, The New Woman describes the life of a woman who longs for freedom in a world where, historically and socially, she is flatly denied it.

“Carmen Laforet is a hugely talented writer, and the first in the history of the Spanish language to give us a complete and open portrait of the female soul from within.” Ramón J. Sénder 

“Once again Laforet is ahead of her generation.” Ismael Rolón