Life

She was born Ana Teresa Parra Sanojo in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, the daughter of Rafael Parra Hernáiz, Venezuelan Ambassador in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, and Isabel Sanojo de Parra.

As a member of a wealthy family, Ana Teresa spent part of her childhood at her father's hacienda, Tazón. After the death of her father, Ana Teresa and her sisters were taken by their mother to study at the Sacred Heart School, in Godella

Godella

Godella is a municipality in the comarca of Horta Nord, province of Valencia, Spain.Godella was founded in 1238 by the cession of James I of Aragon of a region named Godayla to the Aragonese Pedro Maza....

, Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

. Under fervent religious precepts, they received a solid education, suitable for upper-class young ladies. Ana Teresa returned to Caracas

Caracas

Caracas , officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital and largest city of Venezuela; natives or residents are known as Caraquenians in English . It is located in the northern part of the country, following the contours of the narrow Caracas Valley on the Venezuelan coastal mountain range...

 at the age of 19.

After she settled in Paris, de la Parra travelled and had an intense social life. She began to research a biography of Simón Bolívar

Simón Bolívar

Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...

, perhaps inspired by the centenary of his death. However, her idea was interrupted when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...

. Teresa de la Parra wandered in several Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an sanatoriums, mainly in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 and Spain, but did not find a cure. She reflected about her philosophical and literary ideas, and studied her own work and life evolution through the years. The longest and most beautiful letters ever written to her family and friends, and her intimate diaries, come from this time and must be considered as part of her literature.

Teresa de la Parra died in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

. Her remains were exhumed and brought to Caracas in 1947.

Works

She rebelled against the limited expectations for women of her class by long hours of reading and writing. Her fantastic stories were published in the newspaper El Universal, and her Diary of a Caraqueña in the Far East was published in the magazine Actualidades. De la Parra's story Mama X earned first prize in a contest held in a provincial Venezuelan city. This story, as well as her Diary of a young lady who writes because she is bored (which was published in the magazine La Lectura Semanal) was the beginning of her first major work.

Iphigenia

De la Parra's novel Iphigenia: Diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored, published in 1924, marked a change in Venezuelan literature

Venezuelan literature

Venezuelan literature can be traced to pre-Hispanic times with the myths and oral literature that formed the cosmogonic view of the world that indigenous people had. Some of these stories are still known in Venezuela. Like many Latin American countries, the Spanish conquerors have had the greatest...

. Teresa de la Parra wrote most of the novel in 1921 and 1922 during the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez

Juan Vicente Gómez

Juan Vicente Gómez Chacón was a military general and de facto ruler of Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935. He was president on three occasions during this time, and ruled as an unelected military strongman for the rest of the era.-Early years:Gómez was a barely literate cattle herder and...

. Some of the characters in the novel were maliciously close to caricatures of people who were then well-known in Caracas society. The characters Abuelita, Tía Clara and César Leal represent strict adherence to morality. Ambitious and politically corrupt characters like Gabriel Olmedo and Tío Pancho also reflect moral freedom given to men, in contrast against the passive role assigned to women.

The protagonist of Iphigenia, María Eugenia Alonso, a well-educated and intelligent young woman, is partly a self-portrait of the author. María Eugenia struggles against being confined in a marriage that threatens to stifle her intellectual development. She strives to determine whether it is possible for an intelligent and educated woman to evade marriage without losing her respectability in a society where women are expected to become wives and mothers.

The tone, thematic nature and social-historic context of Iphigenia made it controversial among some social and literary circles in Venezuela and Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

. Juan Vicente Gómez's government would not give Venezuelan publishers money to publish Iphigenia. Teresa de la Parra travelled to Paris, where she had friends such as Simón Barceló, Alberto Zérega Fombona, Ventura García Calderón and Gonzalo Zaldumbide

Gonzalo Zaldumbide

Gonzalo Zaldumbide was an Ecuadorian writer and diplomat, born in Quito. He was ambassador to Paris, minister of Foreign Relations and ambassador to London .- Bibliography :* De Ariel, La evolución de Gabriel d'Annunzio...

.

Winner of the annual award given by Casa Editora Franco-Ibero-Americana in Paris in 1924, Teresa de la Parra finally had her work published and received a prize of 10,000 French franc

French franc

The franc was a currency of France. Along with the Spanish peseta, it was also a de facto currency used in Andorra . Between 1360 and 1641, it was the name of coins worth 1 livre tournois and it remained in common parlance as a term for this amount of money...

s. Iphigenia became a categorical success among Parisian intellectuals and readers. It was soon translated into French. Two years after multiple trips and works — which included lectures in Nations Society and exquisite answers to critics — the writer began her second major work.

Souvenirs of Mamá Blanca

Souvenirs of Mama Blanca, published in 1929, was a nostalgia-filled fictionalized memoir of De la Parra's childhood. The spirit of the four sisters living on the hacienda Tazón is reflected in the six sisters living on the hacienda Piedra Azul. The moral "correctness" of Souvenirs of Mama Blanca received favorable attention from those who had criticized Iphigenia. In her letters, de la Parra wrote that there was no Iphigenia scent in Souvenirs of Mama Blanca, which had no protest speech, revolutionary ideas or social criticism.

De la Parra became a sought-after lecturer. Her more important speeches took place in Havana

Havana

Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...

 and Bogotá

Bogotá

Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...

; this last one was very meaningful about her personal ideas of women's roles in Latin American society from colonial times to the 20th century.

External links

• Teresa de la Parra's Gravesite