Elena Quiroga

Spanish writer (1921–1995)

Elena Quiroga de Abarca (Santander, October 26, 1921 – Corunna, October 3, 1995) was a Spanish writer. Elena Quiroga was renowned for her narrative prose work. She was considered one of the most prominent women of her time, mostly because she was preoccupied by injustice, and explored the themes of childhood and adolescence. She was the second woman to enter the Real Academia Española (Royal Academy of the Spanish Language) from 1944 to 1983.

Born into a wealthy family, Elena Quiroga lived with her father in Villoria (Galicia), and was a happy child and teenager. During her time, it was quite uncommon for women to get access to education. However, Elena Quiroga was given a high level of academic training. For that reason, ever since she was a child, she could develop her inner literary sensitivity. We can see that in her first novel that she published when she was 20, La Soledad Sonora (1949), in which she narrates the story of a woman from her adolescence until the end of her life. Even though she did not go to University, Quiroga attended free classes, and worked for many years, 4 to 5 hours a day on her books and texts. After she married Dalmiro de Válgoma in 1950, they moved to Madrid where she had the opportunity to enter a group of writers. They are known for having reinvented the contemporary Spanish novel of the 20th century. On August 31, she was hospitalized in La Coruña because of a serious injury, where she died of a brain disease at the age of 73.

While she started writing at a young age, it was only when she got married that her career really began. When she moved to Madrid, she wrote an award winning novel, Viento del Norte (1950), which is about the relationship between a young maid and her master. In this novel, Quiroga defines the keys of her following writing. Some of them are the use of intimacy about the memories of the childhood and adolescence and a well defined plot and characters. She uses a rich, elegant and pure language in her prose. In 1952, she wrote her third novel: La Sangre. According to her editors, it gave her the status of being an extraordinary novelist because of the delicacy of her style and the interest of the problems that she deals with. It tells the story of four generations through a tree, the true main character of the book.