Spanish · 1925–2000
Martín Gaite grew up in Salamanca, was educated at home by her parents because her father distrusted the schools available to girls, and took a doctorate in Romance philology with a thesis on eighteenth-century Spanish courtship customs. She belonged to the Madrid generation of the 1950s, married the novelist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, and lost her daughter at eighteen. Her novels are about women talking, or failing to talk, in rooms — the interviewer who will not stop asking, the girl at the window, the back room where the things you cannot say are stored. She wrote history, criticism and children's books, translated Flaubert, Woolf and Brontë, and won the Premio Nadal, the Premio Nacional twice and the Príncipe de Asturias. She kept collage notebooks of drawings and clippings that have since been exhibited as works in their own right.