Born in 1946, the novelist Isabel Allende, goddaughter and niece to Chile's future president Salvador Allende, was raised in the lavish home of her grandparents in Chile's capital city, Santiago. Her grandfather-described as a conservative and passionately violent yet endearing old patriarch-came of marriageable age in the early 1900s, when her novel The House of the Spirits opens.
Chile in the early 1900s. From the 1890s to 1920, Chile experienced a great rise in prosperity as a result of a boom in the copper and nitrates mines of its northern deserts. Mining was one of the few ways a poor man could make a fortune in the country, as the character Esteban Trueba sets out to do in The House of the Spirits. It was possible for tough, hardworking miners to amass huge wealth, though they might search for years in poverty before a find catapulted them into Chile's tiny pool of millionaires. The few who struck such good fortune became part of the oligarchy, the small upper class of larger landholders and business proprietors who virtually ruled the nation.
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