Iphigenia

"...I didn't want to tell you the truth for anything in the world, because it seemed very humiliating to me..." The truth is that Maria Eugenia Alonso (Iphigenia) is bored and, more than bored, buried alive in her grandmother's house in Caracas, Venezuela. After tasting the excitement of being a beautiful, unchaperoned young woman in Paris, her father's death has sent her back to a forgotten homeland, where rigid rules of decorum govern. Two men - the married man she adores and the wealthy fiance she abhors - offer her escape from her virginal prison. Which of these impossible suitors will she choose . Iphigenia was first published in 1924 in Venezuela, where it hit patriarchal society like a bomb thrown by a revolutionary. Teresa de la Parra was accused of undermining the morals of young women with this tale of a passionate, frankly sexual woman who lacks the money to establish herself in the liberated, bohemian society she craves. Yet the reading public has kept the novel in demand for nearly seventy years, and this first English translation now introduces the bored, but never boring, young lady to a wider audience. Like the Euripides play from which it takes its title, Iphigenia paints a world that makes women its sacrificial victims. As relevant today as when it was first published, it raises important questions about patriarchy and about the intersection of economics with women's lives.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.