Conclusion

Summary

Similarly to Mary Shelley before her, Adelaida García Morales's own life has been assumed to be reflected in her fiction. Referring to El Sur, seguido de Bene, Robert Saladrigas asserts that this text is ‘uno de los ejemplos más claros de fusión de la vida con la obra’ [one of the clearest examples of the fusion of life and work]. The author concurs that the childhoods narrated in that first volume were inspired by her own, although not a straight autobiographical transposition. How then does a reading of her fiction as Gothic inflect this relationship between the writer – in particular, the woman writer – and her texts? Punter and Kilgour are among those who see a parallel between Victor Frankenstein's concern with issues of creation and control and the life of Mary Shelley. Punter alludes to the author's ‘life lived in the shadow of another, which is another way of referring to loss of self’, while Kilgour sees ‘the relation between creator and created in the text’ as ‘a parody of the author's relation both to her sources and to her creation, the text itself’. Although the matter may have been even more acute in Shelley's case since she had famously creative parents as well as being married to the poet Percy Shelley – who significantly reworked the first version of Frankenstein – perhaps Adelaida García Morales is faced with a somewhat similar situation in that she is married to Víctor Erice, whose film reworking of El Sur is more famous than the original text and who is generally a more celebrated individual than she is. To illustrate the point, is it not ironic that the only mention she is given in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present appears in a discussion of the major films of recent years, when her name is given merely in passing as the author of the story on which Erice's El Sur is based?

Taking these remarks together with her narratives suggests that on one level we could read them as refracting through a Gothic prism their author's anxieties over the honesty or otherwise of her own creativity.