ABSTRACT
Contentiously straddling cultural and political worlds, Mercedes Salisachs (1916-2014) has not received full recognition for her outstanding literary corpus. Perceived as an uncritical Catholic bourgeois writer, a Catalan who writes in Castilian, and a Monarchist who aligns herself with Francoist values, Salisachs is also known as a promoter of feminist and humanitarian principles that seek to reconcile the opposing worlds that haunt her extensive ctional production.1 Shaping Salisachs’s preoccupation with conceptual and sociopolitical binaries is her dissection of conictive family relationships, processes of remembering and forgetting, and guilt and atonement, which refer, directly or covertly, back to the traumatic event of the Spanish Civil War. While Salisachs examines that catastrophe in many novels, this essay will focus on Dos mundos (1940) [Two worlds] and La estación de las hojas amarillas (1963) [The season of autumn leaves]: works that respectively book-end the beginning of the Franco regime and the decade of the dictatorship’s “peace” campaign and neo-capitalist expansion.
