Entre la memoria y la intimidad: Éxodo (1940) y Madréporas (1944), de Silvia Mistral

Abstract

Éxodo. Diario de una refugiada española, published in 1940 in Mexico City, and Madréporas (Maternidad en tres tiempos), also published in the same city in 1944, were the two greatest literary works of Hortensia Blanch Pita’s career, better known as Silvia Mistral. Related to the self-reference genders, both books represent, on the one hand, the republican exile memory and, on the other hand, the intimacy of maternity. The historic context in which the books are framed cannot be detached from a personal context, since they were born from the vital circumstances of the author: the Spanish Civil War and the exile and all their consequences that marked the lives of all the expatriates. Thanks to this new analysis of the previous production of Mistral (1931-1939), located in the journalistic field, we can observe how the author’s writing starts crystallizing and settling down until it leads to two of her seminal works