Carnés, Luisa

Luisa Carnés (Madrid 1905 – Mexico City 1964) was a self-taught Spanish novelist and journalist, who was overshadowed by Spain’s Generation of 27. She was born into a working-class family in the Madrid district of Las Letras, and at eleven she went to work at a milliner’s workshop. In 1928 she published her first book, Calvary Pilgrims, and in 1934, inspired in her new job a waitress in a tea room, she wrote Tea Rooms. Working Women, a revolutionary social novel that broke with traditional narrative structure. Her writing career, like so many others, was interrupted by the breakout of the Civil War, and after the defeat of the Republicans she went into exile in Mexico, where she died an early death, forgotten entirely by the Spanish literary world. Over the last few years efforts are being made in Spain to recover her literary work.