Introduction

Carmen Martín Gaite's literary reputation rests firmly on her work as a author of adult fiction, but, as with many other women writers, she has focused extensively on childhood in her work, and there are significant cross-overs between her writing for adults and children. Entre visillos, like Carmen Laforet's Nada, has rightly been been regarded as a Bildunsgroman in a feminist mode; from a different, less theoretical, perspective, however, both works are also narratives of initiation for teenage girls. As we have seen, La Reina de las Nieves, one of Martín Gaite's late works, deliberately plays with fairy tales, which are more usually the preserve of children's fiction. El cuento de nunca acabar explores the importance of children's literature for the origins of narrative and reading competence, as well as offering insights into adult–child communication and an arguably rosy view of childhood. The author's last, unfinished, work, Los parentescos, is written through the eyes of an adolescent and shares much in common with her three children’s fictions, El castillo de las tres murallas (The Three-Walled Castle) and El pastel del diablo, anthologized as Dos cuentos maravillosos (Two Marvellous Stories), and Caperucita en Manhattan. In closing this volume with an analysis of these four works, we not only demonstrate the homogeneity of Martín Gaite's extensive obra but also conclude, fittingly, with her very last creative composition.

In her children's literature Martín Gaite sets out to convey in a more direct form many of the preoccupations of her adult fiction, particularly as regards the possibilities for girls of self-realization and the acquisition of intellectual autonomy. Her concerns echo many early ideas from Entre visillos, where the effects of oppressive small-town existence on Natalia are keenly painted but an outlet via writing is hinted at rather than firmly worked out.