Profile of Rosa Chacel on Famous Like Me

Rosa Chacel (June 3, 1898 - August 7, 1994) was a famous and sometimes controversial writer from Spain. She was a native of Valladolid.

Chacel was the daughter of a teacher who sent her to live with her grandmother in Madrid. Chacel's move to Madrid occurred in 1908.

By 1909, Chacel's mother enlisted her at Madrid's Escuela de artes y oficios, but, soon after, Chacel moved to the newly built Escuela del hogar y Profesional de la Mujer, also in Madrid. It was while in the latter school that Chacel began to take some feminist views. In 1915, Chacel, intrigued by the world of sculpturism, enrolled at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, but she soon lost interest in the aforementioned topic and abandoned the school by 1918.

Chacel then went on to become a regular person at the Cafe Granja del Henar and at the Ateneo Cafe. These two places were favorite locations for aspiring writers from all over Spain and other European countries. She delivered a controversial speech there, after a conference about women and their possibilities. Like much of the world at that era, machista views predominated in Spain, and Chacel's dialogue on that conference were considered off base or non sensical by many members of Madrid's society.

Chacel, nevertheless, went on forward championing feminism as a new way to live for modern women, and, in 1921, she married a famous painter of the time, Timoteo Perez Rubio. Perez Rubio accepted an important job in Italy and, in 1922, the couple settled in Rome.

That same year, Chacel wrote an article for a magazine named "Ultra". She wrote and edited a magazine named "Estacion, Ida y Vuelta" ("Roundtrip Station") from '22 to 1927, when she and her husband returned to Madrid.

In 1930, Chacel wrote her first novel, which was also named "Estacion, Ida y Vuelta". The Perez Rubio-Chacel couple had a child that year, Carlos, and Rosa Chacel dedicated herself to motherhood and to promoting her novel for the next three years. In 1933, her family moved to Berlin, where she lived for six months. Soon after her return to Spain, the Spanish civil war broke out, and Chacel performed, among other things, as a nurse.

This new, political problem, forced Chacel to move multiple times, and she lived in Barcelona, Valencia, Paris (in 1937) and South America, where she arrived along with her husband and her son in 1939. Chacel and her family lived in Brazil and Argentina.

For the next twenty years Chacel lived in relative obscurity: a well known writer but one who had made no new projects in years. This changed in 1959, however, when she was given a special tyoe of scholarship, a "creative scholarship", so that she could travel to New York City and return to writing. Chacel worked in New York until 1961, when, with her home country living a calmed down social state, she returned to Spain. In May, 1963, Chacel returned to Brazil, where she remained until 1970, when she returned to Spain for a short stay. She would live in Brazil for three more years, as, in 1973, she made her second return to her home country.

In 1977, her husband of 56 years passed away and Chacel, who was a very frequent flyer between Madrid and Rio de Janeiro, decided to stay in Spain for good.

She used her newly found status as a widow to try to rescue some of her old works and to write more novels.

Chacel was the recipient, during the middle 1980s, of a honorable honoris causa doctorate by the University of Valladolid. Towards the end of her life, she won various prestigious awards, some of whom were given by King Juan Carlos. In 1987, she received the "national award of the letters (writing)", an award usually reserved for the very best writers of Spain.

In 1990, she received the "Premio Castilla y Leon de las letras" ("Castilla y Leon award of the letters"), an award whose winners are chosen by the King.

She died peacefully at Madrid in 1994.

The Spaniard national airline Iberia Airlines - a company which Chacel perhaps saw as it grew - just like in Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza's case, decided to honor Chacel by naming an Airbus A340 jetliner airplane after her.

Perhaps ironically, the "Rosa Chacel Airbus A340" flies very frequently between Madrid's Barajas International Airport and Buenos Aires' Ezeiza International Airport or Rio de Janeiro.

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