Rodoreda, Mercè

b. 1908, Barcelona; d. 1983, Gerona

   Writer

   In 1980, Mercè Rodoreda was the first woman writer to receive the prestigious Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes (Prize of Honour in Catalan Letters). She wrote exclusively in Catalan, mainly prose fiction with the occasional foray into poetry and short plays.

   Born into Barcelona's Catalan nationalist bourgeoisie, Rodoreda received little formal education. Nevertheless, during the cultural revival of the Second Republic she worked with the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Institute of Catalan Letters), contributed to several magazines and worked on her first novel Aloma, a psychological study of the eponymous heroine's progression from adolescence to womanhood. The numerous autobiographical references in the novel established the pattern for most of her later work. Together with much of the Catalan intelligentsia she went into exile in 1939 as a result of the Republican defeat in the Civil War. She first moved to France and subsequently to Geneva, where she worked as a translator for UNESCO. While in France she became involved with Armand Obiols, a leading member of a group of Catalan writers known as the Grup de Sabadell (Sabadell Group). This relationship, which lasted until his death in 1971, proved vital for Rodoreda's career, for her creative powers had been seriously threatened by the trauma of exile. It was Obiols who encouraged her to continue writing, and who subsequently became her editor. In the 1940s and 1950s her poetry and short fiction won several literary awards, and in 1962 she published her major novel The Time of the Doves (La plaça del diamant). Foregrounding both feminist and Catalan nationalist themes by presenting the city of Barcelona as a symbolic mirror of the protagonist Natàlia's struggle against repression, the complex interplay of interior and exterior alienation reflects many aspects of Rodoreda's own experience of exile. Gabriel García Márquez has described this as the best novel to come out of post-war Spain. In the mid-1960s she revised her production for a complete works, published by Edicions 62. This led to a re-writing of her first novel on both thematic and stylistic grounds. The definitive 1968 edition of Aloma is in many ways a separate work from that of thirty years earlier. Returning from exile after the death of Franco, she set up home in Romanyà de la Selva, Gerona, rather than her native Barcelona, living and working there until her death in 1983, at which time she was revising an earlier work, La mort i la primavera (Death and Spring) and writing a novel Isabel i Maria (Isabel and Maria), both of which were published posthumously.

   See also: Catalan; exile; feminist writing; women's writing

   Further reading

   - Arnau, C. (1979) Introducció a la narrativa de Mercè Rodoreda, Barcelona: Editions 62(a thorough introduction to Rodoreda's work).

   - McNerney, K. and Vosburg, N. (1994) The Garden Across the Border: Mercè Rodoreda's Fiction, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses (a useful collection of essays on various aspects of Rodoreda's fiction).

   CHRIS DIXON