Carmen Laforet

The exchanged correspondence between the novelist Carmen Laforet and the cultural critic Emilio Sanz de Soto confirms that Laforet, despite her public reticence, never abandoned her role as a writer until the end, and retrieves part of Sanz de Soto's memory fabric, so lacking in printed records. Freedom was the life goal of both, and the difficulty of finding it in the Spain of their time, the central argument of their respective biographies. They detested being directed and directing others, and they enjoyed associating with free people. They were two beings endowed with storytelling. They believed in the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, the brave. Everything human seemed understandable to them, without labels, without the reducing power of identity essentialisms. This correspondence is also the story of "a loving friendship," a concept and experience difficult to absorb in Spanish culture, but which was constantly on the lips and in the life of Emilio Sanz de Soto and Carmen Laforet. The reading of these letters is presided over by a pressing need for dialogue that refers us to Virginia Woolf's beautiful essay, "The Humane Art," in which she conceives the epistolary genre as the most humane art, rooted in "love for friends." These unpublished letters cover the longest span of all of Carmen Laforet's correspondence (from December 1958 to August 1987) and contribute to a better understanding of the author of "Nada" and the "living literary memories" of an exceptional witness of Spanish culture in the mid-century: Emilio Sanz de Soto.