Two Women

"Once banned as immoral, Two Women reads like a forerunner of the psychological novel, full of eros, thanatos, and other deep impulses both dark and light. It's a love story, a tragedy, and a philosophical thriller that bears the reader along on its verbal and conceptual flights as participant in its many raptures and heartaches, its ethical struggles between desire and obligations. Among its character studies, the Countess is as finely drawn and layered a protagonist as you could want, as memorable as many of the century's great heroines, perhaps, and the highly lyrical discourses throughout are finely-wrought cameos of sexual politics and the tensions born of societal pressures.  The translator, Barbara Ichiishi, makes it all come alive." -- Kelly Washbourne * coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation *
"Remarkably, this pioneering novel – published five years before Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre by the most celebrated woman author in nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba – has never been translated into English before now. Written at the height of Romanticism and set in Seville and Madrid, the novel dares to propose divorce, thus flouting the conventions of a deeply conservative Catholic Spain. Ichiishi’s sensitive translation successfully conveys the pernicious effects of a repressive society on the lives of men and women." -- Catherine Davies * coeditor of Transnational Spanish Studies *
"When it appeared in 1842, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s second novel, Dos mujeres, took the Madrid public by storm due to its dramatic portrayal of the quintessential passionate love triangle. The novel intertwines the fates of the angelic Luisa and the talented, worldly Catalina, wife and mistress, in a way that defies gender conventions of the time. With psychological acumen, Gómez de Avellaneda illuminates the strength, subtlety, and supreme altruism of a woman’s soul when the shadow of a rival tests her inner core. Barbara F. Ichiishi’s elegantly crafted translation conveys the poetic range of Gómez de Avellaneda’s prose as well as nuances of narrative voice and dialogue. Gómez de Avellaneda’s Two Women will be hailed as a classic of feminist literature worldwide."  -- Adriana Méndez Rodenas * author of Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims *