Mario Vargas Llosa writes:
'Cor n Tellado, the Asturian author who died just before her eighty-second birthday in 2009 was, in all likelihood, the most significant sociocultural phenomenon in the Spanish language since the Golden Age. What might ostensibly appear to be heresy - and from a qualitative perspective it is - ceases to be so if we begin to view things in quantitative terms. Borges, Garc a M rquez, Ortega y Gasset, any of the most original thinkers and writers in my language that you might care to mention, none of them have reached as many readers or had so great an influence on the way in which people feel, speak, love, hate, understand life and human relations, than Mar a del Socorro Tellado L pez, Socorr n to her friends.'
Cor n Tellado is the best-selling novelist of all time in the Spanish language. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, she wrote thousands of 'novelas rosas' (romantic novels), which captivated readers across the Spanish speaking world, while attracting the attention of intellectuals and writers. Thursdays with Leila tells the story of the eponymous protagonist who remains traumatised by the death of her mother in a public hospital in Spain.
Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made Cor n Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain's Barbara Cartland or France's Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.
Tellado's tales of love, and of women's difficult quest for material and emotional wellbeing, clearly gave great pleasure to her millions of readers throughout and beyond the Franco years in Spain, as well as in Latin America and, in translation, in other European countries - most notably France and Portugal.
The popularity of romance with women readers reflects the extent to which the choice (or imposition) of a male partner has determined women's chances of happiness, and the quality of their lives. But like all good romance heroines, Tellado's Leila is reluctant to acknowledge this, allowing her readers to imagine modes of self-realisation that might not depend on the goodness, charm or otherwise of a husband. Leila is strong, capable, and determined to succeed in her project of making an independent living and taking care of her step-siblings. Of course He appears, the hero: irresistibly handsome, sexually magnetic, and socially powerful. Stephen Knowles is the alpha male we expect in a romance novel since (at least) Jane Austen's Mr Darcy or Charlotte Bronte's Edward Rochester.
Mario Vargas Llosa is is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novels include La ciudad y los perros/The Time of the Hero (1963) and La fiesta del chivo/The Feast of the Goat (2000).
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