Introduction

Although La Reina de las Nieves was first published in 1994, it had been in the planning since 1975, its writing interrupted for personal reasons in the mid 1980s. In her preliminary note to the novel, Martín Gaite describes how, following the publication of Nubosidad variable, she dug out her notes and jottings for this book just as she would later have her own hero disinter his past from letters and photographs found in his late father's papers. Reina, like Nubosidad, is a novel about personal and family relationships constructed as a journey of self-discovery, but it develops these themes from a less exclusively female perspective.

The novel, which is divided into three parts, seems rather fragmentary until the final pages, and in formal terms recalls contemporary detective fiction. In the first part, Martín Gaite offers four apparently unconnected, or loosely connected, vignettes describing the death of an enigmatic figure named Rosa Figueroa, the transferral of a prisoner in Madrid's Carabanchel prison to a mental hospital, the mysterious visit of some tourists to a coastal beauty spot, and the release of Leonardo Villalba from prison following his incarceration for a drugs offence. This is followed by the longest of the book's three parts, consisting of fifteen chapters taken ‘De los cuadernos de Leonardo’ (‘From Leonardo's Notebooks’), in which the reader gradually comes to realize the importance of both the characters and the places so engimatically presented in part one.