This excellent article by Victor Perera discusses Allende's book Paula, written about the death of her daughter. Perera discusses how the book parallels the Greek myth of the goddess Demeter and the spiritual influences in Allende's life that helped her through a time of loss.

Mother Jones Interview
http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/SO94/allende.html

In this interview with Bob Baldock and Dennis Bernstein, Isabel Allende discusses her thoughts on the multicultural and transient nature of American society and her vision of society in the future.

The Emory University Isabel Allende Page
http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Allende.html

Housed at Emory University, this site contains a brief biography of Allende's life, a list of resources, and links to additional sites. Also included is a discussion of Allende's role in the Latin American feminist movement and an examination of her first novel, La Casa de los Espiritus (1982).

Isabel Allende: The Amazon Queen
http://www.lasmujeres.com/allende.htm

The highlight of this site is a wonderfully written essay by Allende in which the author describes a trip that she took through the Amazon to relieve her writer's block. The essay is descriptive and heartfelt. The site also contains a review of a musical performance based on the novel Eva Luna (1987).

BIOGRAPHY
Isabel Allende (b. 1942) was born in Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. After her parents' divorce, she spent her childhood in her maternal grandparents' household; she was especially close to her grandmother, a believer in the occult. When Allende's mother remarried another diplomat, Isabel left Chile to live during her adolescence in Bolivia, the Middle East, and Europe. She began her career by working as a journalist in Chile, writing articles for a radical women's magazine and eventually creating her own television program. In 1970 her father's first cousin, Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, became the first Marxist-Leninist to be freely elected as president of Chile. Three years later he was assassinated by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who instituted a repressive military dictatorship backed by the United States until 1990. Allende and her family fled to Venezuela; she felt that "my life had been cut into pieces and that I had to start over again."

In 1981, after the death of her grandparents, Allende began to write her first work of long fiction. This was the internationally acclaimed novel The House of the Spirits (1982), a chronicle of several generations of an imaginary family in Chile based on her memories of her own family. She has said that "in Latin America, we value dreams, passions, obsessions, emotions, and all that which is very important to our lives has a place in literature—our sense of family, our sense of religion, of superstition too. . . . Fantastic things happen every day in Latin America—it's not that we make them up."

Allende followed the success of her first book with two other novels—Of Love and Shadows (1986) and Eva Luna (1991). Her novel, Daughter of Fortune, was published in 1999. "An Act of Vengeance" was included in Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real (1990).