«Escrito especialmente para ellos»: María Luisa Bombal’s rethinking of «La última niebla» in «House of mist»

Abstract

María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla, published in 1935, was so famous in Chile that Bombal’s North American husband, Rafael de Saint Phalle, urged her to translate it into English years after its publication and after Bombal had mostly given up writing. House of Mistconsciously re-elaborates traits of Bombal’s early writings to depict a picturesque, poetic, passionate and exotic portrait of South American women’s life and adapts them to the genre of Victorian novel. No irony can be traced in the text, despite much of the critique implying so.

Keywords

• exoticism
• intertext
• irony
• translation
• feminism