“The most interesting members of my family were precisely those who were least talked about”, confesses the professor of comparative literature Soledad Fox Maura (New York, 52 years old). It refers to characters such as Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, popularly known as the Red Duchess, or Constancia Connie de la Mora, a woman from Spanish high society who went into exile in the United States after the civil war and became the head of the Republic’s foreign press office. The book Spanish to discover. Portraits I, published by the Círculo de Orellana with Editions.com, collects her life and that of 12 other extraordinary Spanish women profiled by nine writers. “He gave lectures, raised funds and rubbed shoulders with the American elite of the time. From Eleanor Roosevelt, then first lady, to Ernest Hemingway, the French writer André Malraux or the photographer Robert Capa ”, he enumerates pronouncing the three languages —English, French, Spanish—, as if they were one.
The life of Connie, a good girl who studied at Cambridge and divorced (sacrilege!) At only 26 years old, was so interesting and against the current that in her family – conservative and conventional, descendants of the politician Antonio Maura – it became taboo. Something that only increased Soledad’s interest in her. “In 1939 his biography was published in the United States, In place of Splendor, and it became best-seller. His life was like a movie. In fact, in Hollywood they bought the rights but the project was cut short because World War II broke out ”. Connie de la Mora —of whom Soledad ended up writing her own biography— has not been the only counter-current — and taboo — relative in the family of this intellectual.
After investigating the life of Isabel Álvarez de Toledo – her mother’s cousin – last year she decided to publish in Spain My jail, the memories that the red duchess She wrote in 1969 after spending eight months in prison for defying Franco and which in their day also became a best seller in the United States: “There again they nicknamed her The red dutchess a name she denied ”.
The illustrious relatives of Fox Maura do not end there. She is also related to the film director Jaime Chávarri, and to the politician and writer Jorge Semprún, of whom in 2016 she wrote the biography Ida y Vuelta, the life of Jorge Semprún. “When I met him in 2001, he was already an older man, but he was still extremely handsome. He moved in the world of French cinema. Actor Yves Montand was one of his best friends. “
Soledad’s deep interest in her peculiar maternal family was inherited, how could it be otherwise, from her mother, Marisol Maura. “It has been a pioneer. The only one in her class who studied a degree. She traveled to the United States to write a thesis on Emily Dickinson and for many years she worked as a teacher in a private school ”. In fact, Soledad was born there, her only daughter and whom she raised alone: “I completed my first year on an Iberia flight to Madrid. Something symbolic of what my life would be, “says the academic.
Indeed, Soledad has lived between New York, Boston and Madrid, a city to which her mother returned whenever she could. “Here was his life, his family, his friends. He was a member of the board of the Estudio school and taught there for two years. In addition, it created the first exchange of students between Spain and the United States after the transition, precisely between the Study and a center in Boston ”, he says with pride.
Although Soledad lived for 15 years in New York —the city where she studied her degree and did her doctorate—, today she lives in Massachusetts, where she works as a professor at Williams College: “A small and private university”. That’s when he’s not in Madrid, like this fall, enjoying its crowded streets: “I love El Retiro, the home-style menus of the day, the Renoir cinemas, the Filmoteca, the bar breakfasts,” he lists, offering some examples of a list as long as it is enthusiastic.
She does not travel alone, she is accompanied by her partner, the American writer and filmmaker John J. Healy. In addition to his love for Spain – it is not known who of the two likes our country more -, they are united by his love for literature – he has written The Samurai of Seville and its sequel, The daughter of the Samurai of Seville while last year she published her first novel in New York, Madrid again-. Not to mention their joint passion for cinema. As a young man, Healy worked with Woody Allen and John Huston, and Fox Maura, he did it at Unifrance, an agency that represented the French film industry and the Cannes festival abroad. “Every day someone would appear: Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert… When you saw a loden and a cigarillo was there: the unmistakable Claude Chabrol ”. Another movie life.
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