As niece of fallen Chilean president Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende attracted immediate interest when she appeared on the U.S. literary scene in the mid-1980s. On its own merits, though, The House of the Spirits (1982; English translation 1985) is a superb novel. Four generations of Chilean women-female descendants of an oligarchic family-provide a unifying thread and feminine consciousness for a fictional history of a Latin American society. Allende is often compared to Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude is something of a Marxist fictional history of Latin America. Allende skillfully constructs a novel in which one generation of women pass on to the next a legacy of survival strategies and profound human understanding within oppressive social structures. Allende's combination of the personal and the political in the person of the youngest women unmistakably evokes Allende's socialist government, the subsequent military overthrow and neofascist dictatorship, and resistance to tyranny. Allende's fiction after The House of the Spirits, both novels and short stories, is weaker but remains commercially successful in English translation. Some of its elements reinforce U.S. myths about Latin America, especially the questionable concept of a subaltern feminist solidarity. This matriarchy, captured in the person of Eva Luna, who gives her name to one novel and a collection of short stories, threatens to usurp the legendary patriarchy. Nevertheless, along with Argentina's Luisa Valenzuela, Allende remains the most prominent Latin American woman writer on the U.S. literary scene, and the critical response to her writing has indeed been impressive. Allende, who lives a good part of the time in the United States, is much in demand as a speaker.