Juana Manuela Gorriti

ABOUT THE BOOK

A young man returns to Buenos Aires from his childhood exile in Paris. Both of his parents are dead. On the transatlantic crossing, he meets a young woman who has also suffered misfortune, following the death of her father. He is completely smitten by her. The pair meet again at a guest house where they are both staying in Buenos Aires and their romance deepens, but although the young man has a decent job, he feels he has insufficient resources to support a wife. Then, out of the blue . . .

Juana Manuela Gorriti was commissioned by an Argentine insurance company to write this romantic melodrama and the work is in fact dedicated to La Buenos Aires Insurance Company. The main theme is that poverty can be overcome through hard work and thrift (and a little bit of luck).

Interestingly, as well as her ringing endorsement of La Buenos Aires Insurance Company, Gorriti also extols the virtues of two Buenos Aires confectionery shops. Clearly, despite her own hard work, just like the young man in the novel, she too needed some extra financial resources. For all that, the novella is entertaining, elegantly structured and well deserving of its place in the Argentine literary canon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818-1892) is one of the major literary figures in nineteenth century Latin America and yet she is scarcely known outside a narrow academic readership.

Gorriti was born into a weathy family in Salta, in the north of Argentina, in 1818. Her father was a Unitarian politician as a result of which the family was forced into exile in 1831. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, Juana Manuela married Manuel Isidro Belzú, a captain in the Bolivian army and ten years her senior. They separated in 1848 and he became the fourteenth president of Bolivia the same year. In 1865, after surviving one assassination attempt, he was shot dead in his presidential palace. Juana Manuela wrote threee short novels (El pozo de Yocci – The Yocci Well (1869), Oasis en la vida – An Oasis in Life (1888) and La tierra natal – Our Native Land (1889), as well as several collections of short stories.

Work published within the framework of the “Programa Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Culture of the Argentine Republic.

Obra editada en el marco del “Programa Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional y Culto de la República Argentina.

ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE ORIGINAL SPANISH:

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