Carmen Martín Gaite was born in Salamanca, Spain, on December 8, 1925, “right in the middle of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship” (Martín Gaite, p. 129). As she describes in her autobiographical novel, The Back Room, she came of age during the Spanish Civil War under the regime of Francisco Franco. Martín Gaite studied at the University of Salamanca and at the University of Madrid, completing a doctoral thesis in Romance Philology. In 1954 she penned her first novel, The Spa, for which she won the Café Gijón Prize, and in 1957 she published Between the Blinds, which focuses on a girl growing up in Franco’s Spain. After completing four more novels, Martín Gaite looked again at Franco’s impact in her masterpiece, The Back Room. A postmodern classic that melds magical realism with historical events, The Back Room reveals the conscious and unconscious influences of Franco’s dictatorship on the author’s life and writing. A kunstleroman (novel of the development of an artist), the novel probes the many influences—including Hollywood, war, Golden Age literature, fantastic literature, and romance novels—that contributed to Martín Gaite’s development as a writer and even explores how she derives the very novel we are reading.
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