Isabel Allende’s works have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have attained best-seller status in the United States, Australia, and numerous European and Latin American countries. As highly-regarded Argentine author Mempo Giardinelli has observed, Allende is the rare author who inspires both popular and critical acclaim: “Allende es el único caso que concita el interés del mercado y de la academia” (“Siempre”). The Allende phenomenon began in 1982 with the publication of La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), which Donald Shaw considers “without question the major literary event in Spanish America during the early eighties” (53). Various literary critics have pointed out that after the international explosion of Spanish-American fiction known as the Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the region’s literary scene lacked an obvious successor to Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar, who are widely considered the four great Boom authors. Sonia Riquelme Rojas and Edna Aguirre Rehbein attest that Allende’s publication of her first three tremendously successful novels in the 1980s, Casa (House), De amor y de sombra (Of Love and Shadows), and Eva Luna:

The author’s international success also marks a significant achievement in women’s writing, as Casa (House)’s repeated translations and multimillion-volume sales marked the first time that a woman had dominated the Latin American literary scene since the success of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize. Within three years of its publication, Allende’s first novel ranked number one on best-seller lists in Spain, Latin America, and the Netherlands. By 1985, more than one million copies had been sold in Germany alone, in addition to the 400,000 sold in France during that same period. The novel’s English translation in 1985 precipitated a long series of conferences, invited lectures and visiting professorships by Allende in many of the United States’ most prestigious universities, including Barnard College, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Berkeley.