Teresa de la Parra was a Venezuelan novelist. She was one of Venezuela's leading writers of the 1920's. Her novels "Ifigenia" (1924) and "Mama Blanca's Souvenirs" (1929) deal with the mysteries of passing time and the decline of her country's rural aristocracy, to which she belonged.
Background
Teresa de la Parra was born Ana Teresa Parra Sanojo on October 5, 1889 in Paris, the daughter of Rafael Parra Hernáiz, Venezuelan Ambassador in Berlin, and Isabel Sanojo de Parra. Ana Teresa spent part of her childhood at her father's hacienda Tazón.
Education
After the death of her father, Ana Teresa and her sisters were taken by their mother to study at the Sacred Heart School, in Godella, Spain. Under fervent religious precepts, they received a solid education, suitable for upper-class young ladies.
Career
Parra returned to Caracas, Venezuela's capital, as an adolescent. Her first book, Diario de una señorita que se fastidiaba (Diary of a Lady Who Was Bored, 1922), uses the format of a young woman's letter and journal to explore the limited options available to women in Caracas in the early 1900s. In the novel, 18-year-old María Eugenia struggles with the social conventions of the patriarchal society around her, much in the same manner as some of the female characters of Edith Wharton , Parra's contemporary. A succès de scandale upon its publication, the novel caused some outraged conservatives to accuse Parra of "undermining the morals of young women." It was republished two years later as Ifigenía, with the title serving as an ironic comment on the main character's sense of self (she compares herself to Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra of Greek myth).
While Parra's first novel received much praise, her second novel, Las memórias de Mamá Blanca (1929), is considered her masterpiece. The memoir of an elderly woman who recounts her childhood on a sugarcane plantation, the book also paints a portrait of the now-vanished world of Venezuelan plantation society at the end of the 19th century. It was published in English for the first time in 1959 as Mama Blanca's Souvenirs, and again in 1993 as Mama Blanca's Memoirs. Like much of her work, the novel is fictionalized autobiography, drawing on her childhood memories of living on her family's plantation.
She formed a group of French and South American writers in 1926, and the following year began lecturing on the role of women in South America, which she continued doing throughout her life. A frequent traveler, in her final years Parra returned to Europe to seek a cure for the tuberculosis which ultimately claimed her life in 1936, when she was only 47. Her remains were moved to Caracas 11 years later.
Views
Quotations:
"The most unpresentable persons are generally the most interesting."
"Memories do not change, and change is the law of existence. If our dead, the closest, the most beloved, were to return to us after a long absence and instead of the old, familiar trees were to find in our souls English gardens and stone walls - that is to say, other loves, other tastes, other interests, they would gaze upon us sadly and tenderly for a moment, wiping away their tears, and then return to their tombs to rest."