Isabel Allende was born in 1946 to Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomat, and Francisca (Llona Barros) Allende. Twenty-seven years later her uncle, Chilean President Salvador Allende, died in a military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. The House of the Spirits was partly a response to this traumatic event: “I think,” observed Allende, who had worked in Chile as a journalist, “I have divided my life [into] before that day and after that day” (Allende in Chapman and Dear, p. 14). As a young girl Allende had lived in Chile’s capital, Santiago, with her maternal grandparents—a conservative, violent, but endearing grandfather and a spiritualist grandmother whose stories served as Allende’s introduction to her family’s and her country’s past.
Mining for prosperity. In the early 1900s Chile’s economy was growing and its society changing. A war with Bolivia and Peru from 1879 to 1883 had added two nitrate-rich northern provinces to the country, and with the money earned from mining these areas Chile could invest in industry and infrastructure, stimulating the growth of new businesses and creating new jobs.
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