Until the publication of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, few female writers had emerged from the boom of Latin American literature that began in the 1960s. When the translation of La casa de los espritus appeared in 1985, however, Allende received the kind of international attention that had previously been reserved for writers such as Colombian Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garca Mrquez. In fact, The House of Spirits has frequently been compared with Garca Mrquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude because of Allende's mixture of magical and realistic elements and her multi-generational plot. While there are some similarities between the two works, The House of the Spirits is distinguished by its author's unique perspective as a woman and a Chilean. ...