The worlds of 'Celia' by Elena Fortún

Abstract

Elena Fortún (1886-1952) is an important Spanish children’s writer, the author of a famous series of novels about Celia, who first appeared at the end of 1920s in stories published in a children’s supplement of a popular magazine. Told in the first person by a seven year-old girl, these simple and humorous stories present an ordinary childhood in an affluent Madrid family using familiar elements of setting and time frames simultaneous with the reader’s activities. In the 1930s the stories became successful novels of education. Though the episodes of Celia’s life trace important social changes in the middle-class life of the 1930s (family relations, emergence of feminism, economic decline, the civil war and its aftermath), a distinct quality of Fortún’s text is also the child’s Quixotic inability to separate the real world from the world of her prodigious imagination, which allows her to construct interpretations subtly critical of the adult world.