2023-12-26 21:20:22
The enormous popularity of a character eclipses its author. Celia was and is much better known than her creator, Elena Fortún (Madrid, 1867-1952), who, contrary to what her surname suggests, led a life of misfortune plagued by difficulties. The book ‘Elena and her friends’ (Renaissance) now unravels the little-known story of one of the most inspiring and beloved authors of our literature, but buried under Celia’s success.
Edited by the Professor of Theory of Literature Purificació Mascarell and prologued by Manuela Carmena, their testimonies reveal the essence of Fortún, pseudonym of Encarnación Aragoneses. A complex woman hidden behind her iconic childhood character, born in 1928, and which had her television series in the nineties. A brilliant journalist and writer, she enjoyed success in the years of the Second Republic thanks to Celia and her brother Cuchifritín in a series of eight titles that she opened in 1928 with ‘Celia what she says’.
The book seeks to reverse oblivion through the voices of María Lejárraga, Josefina Carabias, Matilde Ras, Carmen Laforet, Carmen Conde, Viera Sparza, Inés Field, Francisco Ayala, Carmen Martín Gaite, Francisco Nieva, Carmen Bravo-Villasante, José Luis Borau, Marisol Dorao or Juan García Hortelano. It adds to the growing research on the figure of Fortún, providing a unique vision of his life and work. It compiles testimonies that bring us closer to the author, revealing her face “lively like a bird or a wandering swallow, with a sharp and cordial gaze,” in the words of the illustrator and painter Viera Sparza.
Not a dogmatic Catholic, Fortún married the republican soldier Eugenio de Gorbea, but the suicide of her husband in Argentina and the death of her son shortly after represented an emotional catharsis. «I don’t know how or why I started reading Celia’s books. But to some extent they shaped my self,” says Manuela Carmena, former judge and former mayor of Madrid. “The testimony of her friends makes us love her even more,” says the writer and columnist Elvira Lindo.
Mutual admiration
«Elena Fortún has been one of the most generous creatures I have met in my entire life; “She always had help for the unfortunate, consolation for the afflicted, support for the weak, indulgence for those who fell into need, and, above all, cordiality in abundance for all those around her,” says the writer and graphologist Matilde Ras.
Fortún and Ras were more than intimate personally and intellectually. They admired each other since the times of the Sapphic Circle established in Madrid by Victorina Durán before the Civil War. They united their emotional, literary and ideological destinies in life and would do so again in oblivion. Pioneers in the fight for women’s rights and modernity, original and constant authors, humanists committed to their time, they were the vanguard in the defense of women’s rights and the denunciation of injustices. A boldness that they paid for with exile and exclusion after the war and, upon their return, with a much more cruel forgetfulness towards Ras than towards Fortún.
Detail of the cover of ‘Celia’s Notebook’ RC
Contemporaries of fighters such as María de Maeztu, Clara Campoamor, Maruja Mallo, Concha Méndez, María Lejárraga or Carmen Baroja, their relationship of comings and goings was nourished and grew through their collaborations in Blanco y Negro and ABC in the 1920s. . “They are the great ghosts of Spanish modernity,” said Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, professor at the University of Exeter, and student of Ras’s ‘secret’ work.
«If there can be a deep, shared friendship, and yet, in which one of the friends totally ignores the existence of the other, I had an intimate friendship with Elena Fortún for more than twenty years; from the day that, when I was six, Celia’s first story, published in Black and White, fell into my hands until May 8, 1952, when Elena Fortún died,” wrote Carmen Laforet, author of ‘Nada’ . «The real Celia was herself, as those who knew her know very well. Elena Fortún has never been old, not even in the sad days of her life, when her bitterness made her voice acquire tones of tenderness under an indelible childish smile,” pointed out the first woman with a chair in the RAE.
Drawing by Elena Fortún for her stories by Celia RC
«Those years of our common exile in Buenos Aires were the time when, sometimes, Elena Fortún appeared at my house, and my daughter looked at the visitor with timid curiosity because I had warned her that that very affectionate lady was the one who had written Celia’s stories that so much recreated and pleased her in her childhood readings,” said the writer and Cervantes award winner Francisco Ayala.
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