08-08-2025
Isabel Allende's feminist manifesto continues in new book, My Name is Emilia del Valle
When Isabel Angélica Allende Llona was around nine years old, she travelled with her grandfather to the Argentinian Patagonia, where he had sheep. 'We went by train from Santiago as far to the south as the train would go, continued by car, crossed the Andes on horseback, and on the other side, we were picked up by rangers,' she writes via email. 'That journey is engraved in my memory. That's Chile for me, the country I long for.'
This deep longing and loss is present in every single book Allende, now 83, has written — from her bestselling debut The House of the Spirits (1982) to her latest, My Name is Emilia del Valle (translated by Frances Riddle, published by Bloomsbury), which is set mostly between San Francisco and Chile. From the moment she flew to Venezuela where she would remain for 13 years, Chile stopped being hers in the way it had till then, and everything changed forever. Over the years, Allende would keep interrogating the themes of displacement and identity, of memory and family, as well as the potent links between the personal and the historical, through her stories.
It started with The House of the Spirits, featuring the sprawling del Valle clan. A fantastically embellished history of her family, the book was inspired by Allende's maternal grandmother's family — 'they were 12 siblings, all of them quite original, wonderful inspirations for extravagant characters'.
Did she know back then that she would keep returning to them, from Daughter of Fortune(1999), to Portrait in Sepia (2000), and now in My Name is Emilia del Valle? 'I had no idea if that book was ever going to be published or that I would write other books. Of course, I didn't think that clan would intrude in other books,' she says.
Juggling society's mores
Allende explains that Emilia sprung into being because she needed a way to write about the 1891 Chilean Civil War with a neutral voice. 'It had to be a foreigner, and I wanted a woman narrator.'
Like all of Allende's heroines, Emilia too is rebellious and intrepid, and way ahead of her time. The illegitimate daughter of a former novice nun, the Irish Molly Walsh, and a Chilean aristocrat, Gonzalo Andres del Valle, who seduced and abandoned her, Emilia is raised in 19th-century San Francisco by her mother Molly and her husband Francisco Claro, the director of a local school, who dotes on her, and will support and encourage her empowerment. He is the reason she grows up with a desire to see the world and 'experience everything intensely'.
This, coupled with a need to find out the truth about herself, her biological father, and a homeland she's never known, pushes Emilia, a columnist, to request a war correspondent position. But why would the newspaper, where she'd finagled a regular column writing under a male pen name, send Emilia to Chile? That's how she becomes Emilia del Valle, someone who speaks Spanish and has local family connections.
Allende had to juggle the social mores of the time — so Emilia gets assigned the human-interest stories, while her male colleague, Eric Whelan, is given the more 'serious' coverage.
Writing as exorcism
Our focus naturally shifts to Allende's feminist manifesto, the veins of which run through all her work, and through her own life, from an age as young as five years old. 'I was an angry little girl,' shares Allende. 'They (the women in her household — her mother and the maids) had no power, no money, no freedom as the men had. That was the beginning of a lifelong feminist struggle, which crystallised during my years at Paula (Chile's first feminist magazine co-founded by Allende around the time of the second feminist wave). Those ideals have not changed.' Even through great tragedy, admirably.
The Isabel Allende Foundation founded in 1996 is dedicated to the memory of her late daughter, Paula Frias, who died unexpectedly after a year spent in coma following a porphyria attack. Like everything else Allende does on the public stage, it is an extension of her feminism, offering support and empowerment to girls and women through education, knowledge about reproductive rights, protection from domestic and sexual violence.
And the maverick shows no signs of flagging. 'For me, writing is not a chore. I write because I love the process. Next year, I will publish a non-fiction book about writing. And I am working on a memoir,' she says.
'I write to remember, to understand, to exorcise my demons, to overcome my obsessions. I can only write about something that I care for. I still write with the same enthusiasm and awe as I did 40 years ago.'
The writer is a Mumbai-based author and editor.
