Elena Quiroga

The rediscovery of a classic coming-of-age novel about the spiritual awakening of a teenage girl in the 1930s.

 "Let no young person read this book who has never asked any deeper questions, who is sure of life as if life were a place, and sleeps but does not dream, and wanders but does not move ahead, and feels no curiosity."

 With this warning, Elena Quiroga drew attention to the peculiarities of I Write Your Name, a novel that covers the years a teenage girl spends, from ten to sixteen, in an oppressive convent boarding school. The story is set in the years when Spain faced enormous divisions that would culminate in the Civil War. For Tadea, the protagonist, they also constitute a key stage of inner growth, of existential doubts, of philosophical searching, of questions about truth and freedom that the narrow-minded nuns are unable to answer. 

 Out of print for over thirty years, I Write Your Name is a moving coming-of-age novel with a spiritual undercurrent evocative of Simone Weill, an outsider like Elena Quiroga herself, overshadowed by other great figures such as Carmen Laforet and Ana María Matute within the limited space of literary prestige traditionally afforded to female authors, and whose legacy is now being forcefully reclaimed.