Radhika Santhanam reviews The Soul of a Woman, by Isabel Allende thehindu.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thehindu.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Isabel Allende Has a Few Ideas on How to Bring Down the Patriarchy, and We Are Listening
31 Shares Feminism, like the ocean, is fluid, powerful, deep and encompasses the infinite complexity of life; it moves in waves, currents, tides and sometimes in storms. Like the ocean, feminism never stays quiet. Isabel Allende s definition of feminism is, as someone who has read any of her 26 books might expect, as rich and mesmerizing as it can get. The Chilean icon shares this and many other theories and experiences that led her to describe herself as a feminist since kindergarten in her just-released new memoir,
‘The Soul of a Woman’: Isabel Allende mediates on feminism, inequality, aging and love By Serena Chang | 08 March, 2021
Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. She now lives in California. Following a career in journalism and exile in Venezuela, she published her widely acclaimed novel
The House of Spirits in 1982, which paved the way for her to achieve literary stardom. Many of her bestselling novels are centred around the extraordinary lives and experiences of her female protagonists. Her work has been translated into over 42 languages, and she has been described as the world’s most widely-read Spanish language author.
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Isabel Allende never thought she would count herself in the group of wave-making women protagonists she’s used to writing about. “In March 2013, I was in Mexico for a women’s conference and I did a speech on feminism that went viral,” she says. “Some time later, my editors decided they wanted to print the speech into a booklet.” When she read it, Allende was less than impressed. “It sounded so dated because so much has happened relating to the movement since that time: #MeToo, the Women’s March, LGBTQ+ progression, and more recently with Black Lives Matter,” she says. “So I told them, ‘No, we’re not going to do this.’”
By Isabel Allende
Ballantine: 192 pages, $23
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Isabel Allende‘s prolific output has delighted readers around the world for more than 40 years. On Wednesday, HBO Max announced it will stream a three-part biopic, “Isabel,” about her extraordinary life, beginning March 12. And at 78, Allende is still delivering books that would make an up-and-comer’s career. Her latest, part memoir and part treatise on feminism, is “The Soul of a Woman.”
With arresting honesty, Allende’s memoir details the difficulties of being a progressive, a feminist and now an elder stateswoman: a male-dominated publishing landscape, a world that still exploits women and a culture where it can be hard for an author of a certain age to find love. Passion, she asserts, never wanes, though she’s had to make adjustments: “Before, I used to fantasize about a night in the c