Imagination in novels and autobiography in letters : the female presence in Juan Valera's life and fiction

Abstract

Juan Valera (1824-1905) left behind a substantial epistolary corpus. Some of the author’s letters have been destroyed over the years, others lost, but all those penned by Valera which still exist have been painstakingly sought out and compiled by Leonardo Romero Tobar and a team of colleagues in their series, Correspondencia, spanning eight volumes and Valera’s life from the age of 23 in 1847 to his death in 1905, at the age of 81. The series, published between 2002 and 2009, has created an invaluable opportunity to build upon the research of biographers and scholars of the 20th century, and indeed, those of the early years of the 21st who were limited to the study of Valera’s letters through more modest collections or, indeed, the elusive and fragmentary collections held by Valera’s descendents.