Ana Isabel: A Respectable Girl

This is the first English translation of one of the key works of 20th-century Venezuelan fiction. Published in 1949, it is a classic coming-of-age story set in Caracas in the 1920s, exploring issues of race, class, and gender, and exposing the colonial and patriarchal legacy of the country in an era before urban development and the dependence on an oil economy. A modern Latin American classic and the Venezuelan counterpart to Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1984), Ana Isabel broke with the symbolic realist genre in vogue in Latin American narrative works and inaugurated a new form of expression with poetic overtones. This book will appeal to those interested in girlhood, feminist, and postcolonial studies, as well as to students of modernist literature.