School of the Sun by Ana Maria Matute. New York. 1963. Pantheon Books. Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Kerrigan. 242 pages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

    A Spanish writer’s approach by the intimist route to the still unassuaged griefs of the Civil War. What happens is that the protected bourgeois world in which it is possible to go on with the pretext of childishness at fourteen is split open by the realities of war, or, rather, the realities of which the war is the expression.

Ana María Matute Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 – 25 June 2014) was the most prominent woman writer of 20th century Spain. Her novels and short stories have won many prestigious literary awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Nadal, Premio de la Crítica and Premio Café de Gijón. She was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre. She is considered to be one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands. She has been a guest lecturer to the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila (‘Stories about the Artamila’, all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only ‘the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one’. The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, ‘The Boy Next Door,’ when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. Matute was a university professor. She traveled to various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, ‘Los Mercaderes’. On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.