Allende speaks powerfully of her literary inheritance, in particular the influence of Shakespeare. She would draw the characters in a play and then cut them out, making each stand up with a match stick "so I would know what the heck was going on". Reading Shakespeare left the sediment that turned her into a writer, she says. "I love King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. You take just a little piece, even out of context and he's great. When I read it, it wasn't for its literary value. I was entertained by the story."Read More
Her purpose as a writer, she says, is to "convey something and for that I have to trap the reader's attention. If I lose them, then what I write is lost. As a journalist you know that what you write competes with other things in the same paper. Writers often write for friends or critics, and forget readers. I feel the book and characters choose me, and if I allow enough time, they will talk. I ask myself, 'Why am I doing this'? 'Why am I writing about the Gold Rush?' [explored in her book Daughters of Fortune]. Then at the end, I realise I have been exploring something that has been related to me and my life and temperament. It's a book about a woman trapped in Victorian times, trapped in a life and a corset. She decides to confront the masculine world. She has no tools or weapons to fend for herself. She needs to dress like a man, act like a man to survive. Isn't that what my generation of feminists did? Exactly that."
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Chilean Literature
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