Although La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) never explicitly identifies the country or the precise dates in which it is set, the text is clearly a portrait of Chile from the earliest decades of the twentieth century through 1973 or 1974. In one of the earliest studies of Casa (House), Hija de la fortuna (Daughter of Fortune) and Retrato en Sepia (Portrait in Sepia) as a trilogy, Eliana Rivero establishes 1910–73 as the narrated time period, and critics have generally accepted this view. In her intriguing study of the re-centering of national history through female lineages, Margarita Saona describes the novel as an “encarna[ción de] la historia nacional en la historia de un linaje de mujeres: desde la madre de Clara, Nívea, hasta su nieta, Alba” (15). Clearly, this gynocentric historiography is rooted in a progressive politics, and its conflation of private and public spheres makes it particularly well suited to a spatial analysis. As Saona further notes “[S]i la representación de la familia presenta como el ámbito en que se articulan el espacio público y privado, y el espacio público es el espacio de la historia nacional, se está formulando al mismo tiempo un espacio para el sujeto en el interior de la nación” (14). The juxtaposition of national and familial history begun in this novel establishes a socio-political framework for the final works of the trilogy, written nearly two decades after Allende’s narrative debut: the three works are rooted in a feminine and feminist genealogy that they present as a counterpoint to masculinist histories. In the case of Allende’s breakthrough novel,

In her study of Allende’s representations of women and dictatorship, Alina Camacho-Gingerich concedes that the novels do not necessarily attempt a faithful re-creation or reconstruction of Chilean history (13); consequently, a spatial reading must resist the temptation to restrict the author’s fictitious universe to the boundaries imposed by geographic space and quotidian political maneuverings.