A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life

Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet Robert Graves, was raised by her parents on the island of Majorca, in postwar Spain. At home she spoke English and absorbed the family's thoroughly British culture; in her mountain village she spoke the local variant of Catalan and was steeped in the island's Mediterranean folkways; and in convent school she received a rigid Franco-era Spanish education, a mix of Catholicism and fascist ideology. Her beautifully nuanced memoir, already published in England to great acclaim, is a profound meditation on how these three cultures and languages-English, Catalan, and Spanish-have shaped her life and thought. It is also a many-voiced portrait of Spain under Franco, tracing the patterns of love, sacrifice, and female forbearance that mark not only her own life but those of other Spanish women she has known. Her individual portraits are masterly-"through them," said the Daily Telegraph, "matters barely mentioned in most histories of the Franco years become appallingly real"-and her ability to articulate the essence of Spain has won her deserved comparison to Orwell and V.S. Pritchett.