After a hiatus in the publication of the series during the Francoist censorship period, the discovery of the unpublished manuscript of Celia en la revolución (Celia in the revolution) (1943) at the end of the 1980s by researcher Marisol Dorao spurred interest in not only Celia but also in Fortún, and the writer’s works were published again. Since the 1920s, Fortún’s stories have continued to be republished, and Celia’s adventures have been enjoyed by generations of girls. Through different examples, I demonstrate that Celia was not always the rebellious girl depicted in the first volumes, and I show how she transitioned into a misfit or what would later be called La chica rara (the weird girl) in an essay thus named by Martín Gaite in 1987. The second section turns to the reaction of Franco’s censorship corps to these books and their underlying ideology and considers the reception among members of the next generation of writers and the impact of these books on them. In the first section I consider the creation and impact of Celia as an alternative character in children’s literature in the context of the role of women and girls in society in the 1920s. I consider Fortún as a harbinger of girls’ power in the 1920s and seek to discuss how she, as a literary figure, served as a precursor to authors of the 1950s in Spain. Appreciating her influence on different occasions, writer and critic Carmen Martín Gaite pointed out that “a rigorous study of the work of Elena Fortún, which all writers of the fifties enjoyed in childhood, will explain what the principles of ‘social realism’ of the mid-century novel were” (1993: 37). These young characters, as reflected in the works of Carmen Laforet (1921–2004), were modelled on Celia and written in emulation of Fortún’s literary style. These bildungsroman show the characteristic stifling context of post-war Spain, represented through an unstable family atmosphere.
Nada (Nothing) (1944), by 23-year-old Carmen Laforet, initiated a boom of autobiographical novels written by women that featured adolescents. During the 1940s and 1950s, while the final stories in the series, Celia institutriz (Celia governess) (1944) and Celia se casa (Celia gets married) (1950), were being published some of her early readers began their own careers as writers. Her young readers could continue appreciating Celia’s ability to disclose how things are not always the way adults say they are, even during a period of suppressed freedom.
In doing so, Fortún encourages girls to be critical of their own world during the Second Republic (1931–1939), a period of social progress that preceded the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).Īlthough progressive elements were silenced under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) in the decades to follow, Fortún continued adding titles to the series from her exile in Argentina. Although Celia’s world reflects a hierarchy in which adults dominate children, she finds a way to ask her readers to consider the fairness of given situations. The construction of Celia’s childhood innocence allowed Fortún to promote non-conformist messages directed at all members of society, starting with little girls and then their mothers. She presented Celia as a girl who encouraged children to wonder why grown-ups have to be right even in the most illogical of circumstances. In late 1920s Spain, Elena Fortún (pseudonym of Encarnación Aragoneses, 1886–1952) introduced the character of Celia Gálvez de Montalbán, a seven-year-old girl from a middle-class family in Madrid.