Monday, May 4, 2009

Obituaries / Corín Tellado / Prolific Spanish romantic novelist

Corín Tellado
Poster by T.A.

Corín Tellado

Prolific Spanish romantic novelist

Michael Eaude
Monday 4 May 2009 00.01 BST

Many believed that the romantic novelist Corín Tellado, who has died aged 81, was a publishing house, like Mills & Boon. Yet she was just one person, despite producing some 4,000 novels in a 63-year writing career. She was the biggest-selling novelist of the 20th century, selling some 400m books in Spain and Latin America.

Illustratetion by T.

Tellado grew up in a fishing village in the Asturias region on Spain's northern coast and her father worked as an engineer in the merchant navy. As a child, she devoured 19th-century classics by writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Honoré de Balzac. When one of her four brothers wrote a novel, she felt it was unrealistic and produced one herself at the age of 18. The local bookseller suggested she send it to the publishers Bruguera in Barcelona. They published the book, called Atrevida Apuesta (Daring Bet), and offered her a contract to deliver a 76-page novel every week. This she did until Bruguera's collapse in 1985 released her from the contract's draconian terms: in 1973 she lost a lawsuit brought by Bruguera against her after she refused to sign contract extensions.

From the 1940s onwards Bruguera was the publisher that cashed in on the Spanish tradition of selling cheap, popular novels from newspaper stalls in the street. Bruguera manufactured novela negra (noir novels, detective stories) for men and novela rosa (pink novels, romances) aimed at women. The Franco dictatorship (1939-75) encouraged these books: they served as "literature of evasion" to take people's minds off widespread poverty and repression.

Corín Tellado
Poster by T.A.

Tellado saw herself as a writer of realist novels about the difficulties of life and love. Hers were not stories of princes falling in love with Cinderella, but of ordinary women living in contemporary Spain. Her popularity is due to this realist aspect, though the books did not for this reason stop being literature of evasion. The genre demanded a happy ending. In an early novel, Tellado left her heroine blind. The Bruguera editor sent back the typescript, demanding: "Give her an operation." Corín complied and the novel was duly published.

Realist aspects also led to censorship of her books by the dictatorship. From the start, she included kisses and had women driving cars and working. This did not fit well with Franco's Catholic ideology of love inside marriage with women subordinate. "Some months," she said, "the censors rejected four novels. I told things clearly. Censorship taught me to imply things."

Her writing gave her the financial independence, when her 1959 marriage failed, to separate in 1962 and bring up her two children. Each day, she started work at 5am with coffee and a packet of menthol cigarettes.

Corín Tellado
Poster by T.A.

She was widely read throughout Latin America and, from the 1960s, she also published fortnightly photo-novels: picture books with text in bubbles. Her Corín Ilustrada sold 750,000 a week at its peak. In the late 1970s, with censorship abolished, she tackled tougher subjects, such as abortion and rape. She expressed boldly feminist views. ("Not even my granddaughters will be liberated, because men make the laws.") She also published 26 erotic novels under the name Ada Miller.

Tellado was honest and convinced of the value of her literature, though she exaggerated its feminist elements. Her well-told stories in plain language fall within the framework of traditional romance. Her millions of fans gained great pleasure and the freedom to dream. She is survived by her son and daughter and six grandchildren.

• María del Socorro Tellado López (Corín Tellado), novelist, born 25 April 1927; died 11 April 2009

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