Rereading the Spanish American Essay. Translations of 19th and 20th Century Women's Essays

Rereading the Spanish American Essay. Translations of 19th and 20th Century Women's Essays. Ed. Doris Meyer. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 324 pages.

There's poetic as well as generic justice in the appearance of this sampler of thirty-six essays, clearly the least celebrated of the genres practiced by Spanish American women writers.

A "rereading," the title declares. But the work by the twenty-two authors included will instead be-for most-a first experience; the selections are all in English translation and presumably intended for the general reader. Even among Hispanists, who is likely to have read anything by Maria de la Merced Beltran de Santa Cruz y Montalvo, alias the Countess of Merlin, Soledad Acosta de Samper, or Flora Tristan?

Far from quarreling with their inclusion, together with much betterknown writers like Victoria Ocampo, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Mistral and Rosario Ferre, I applaud their resurrection. One can only lament that more anthologies like this one have not already been published (and in the original, before their translation). No one can deny that female essayists have...