Ángeles Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes, Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado, Mal de amores, Ninguna Eternidad como la mía and El cielo de los leones are all very different texts thematically and stylistically but all have enjoyed popular success. The reason is not difficult to explain.

The award-winning and bestseller novels Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores have helped to reaffirm Mastretta’s central position in Mexican literature and as an author of international standing. Mastretta’s novels such as Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores are in some respects difficult to categorize: thematically they have revolutionary implications, whereas stylistically they are more restrained, hardly ever rebelling against the male order at the level of language. Mastretta’s work does not offer a frontal assault against established categories but rather provides intermittent challenges, questioning but also reinstating patriarchal values and structures. This study has analysed those neglected features of her works, particularly Mal de amores, which even critics well-disposed towards Mastretta have often failed to acknowledge: their subversion of hegemonic rationalist discourses, their comprehensive but often ambiguous feminist focus and their understated metafictional characteristics. Although I have revealed significant links – on both thematic and stylistic levels – between the Mexican Revolutionary Novel on the one hand and Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores on the other, I have also pointed to Mastretta’s creative rewriting of this tradition, an aspect of her work which has not received previous critical attention.

Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores are important contributions to Mexican and, more generally, Latin American feminism.