The affected authorship of the protagonist of La mujer sin nombre (2021) by Vanessa Montfort

Abstract

In 2021, Vanessa Montfort published the novel La mujer sin nombre, whose blurb expresses: “The mystery of the woman who wrote in the shadows some of the most important works of the 20th century.” The story tells the life of María Lejárraga who participated in the literary Madrid of the 1920s, in the Paris of the Belle Epoque, in the political struggle of women during the second republic, in exile during the Civil War, and later during the Franco regime, having the friendship of cultural personalities such as Manuel de Falla, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Federico García Lorca, among others. The novel focuses on the protagonist to unravel the mystery that implies having written all her production and signed it with the name of her husband: Gregorio Martínez Sierra. From a framework linked to the affective turn and gender studies, we understand that the mystery to unravel displaces, in the novel, social problems towards a sphere of sacralization. If we think that emotions expose a reproductive circuit that allows us to explain how they are socially generated, how they are reproduced and how they are distributed through the economy of affections, we can understand how in parallel they generate, legitimize and accept inequalities of genre.