10th Fenix Congress: Publications

The 10th Fenix Congress focused on alliances forged by Spanish women intellectuals – writers, artists, actresses – in exile during Franco’s dictatorship. The studies of this congress are published in the 15th Special Issue of the Fenix Network: Women, Letters, Alliances: Epistolary Relationships of the Spanish Exile, in the journal Romance Quarterly (vol. 70, Issue 2, 2023). The presentation of the Special Issue, under the title Creating Epistolary Spaces of Proximity and the articles of this Special Issue are available online.

The studies included in this dossier foreground the relations and communities created by exiles to bridge the distances that separated them from various groups of friends and colleagues. The groups comprise, first, their fellow-exiles, who had found a host country in the United States, Latin America, or Europe; second, the ‘insiles,’ consisting of their compatriots who remained in Spain during the Francoist regime; and, third, the new friends they made in the host country and from whom they would at a later stage be separated once they had relocated or returned to Spain. The studies compiled in this issue resort to exiled women’s private correspondence and show how the letters enable the exiles to create an epistolary space of proximity. This effect of rapprochement, in spite of the physical distance that separated the correspondents, is the most salient feature of the alliances and communities that are studied in this dossier.