Women writers have participated in all the movements, styles, genres, debates, and themes that we find in twentieth-century Spanish literature. However, peninsular literary historians, if they have considered them at all, have tended to group these women together in order to segregate them from their male counterparts, as if their work was in some way inherently inferior. This phenomenon continues to occur well into the twenty-first century. The writers themselves complain that, as a result of this kind of gender-based segregation, they feel compelled to tell different stories. As Laura Freixas reports (1996: 19–20, my translation): ‘it is not surprising that many women writers aspire to write asexual literature as a way of writing literature of quality, true literature; that they aspire to being considered writers’. Alternatively, proponents of women's literature have argued for the affirmation of gender differences as intellectually, culturally, and creatively significant. Women write because, and not in spite of the fact that, they are women. Gender, along with other differential indices of cultural identity, matters in ways both tangible and intangible to stories of particularity and collectivity.

We shall here adopt a compromise between a critique of strategies of exclusion and a celebration of gender differences. In order to explore Spain's postwar literary history as it has, until very recently, been written, I will discuss five ‘canonical’ novels published by well-known peninsular women writers after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War in 1939: Carmen Laforet's *Nada (1945), Ana María Matute's *Primera memoria (1960), Carmen Martín Gaite's *El cuarto de atrás (1978), Almudena Grandes's *Las edades de Lulú (1989) and Lucía Etxebarria's Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998). Insofar as these are texts that share some intrinsic and extrinsic similarities they will help us to investigate continuity and contiguity. It is not coincidental that in all five novels female protagonists narrate in the first person, albeit with varying degrees of temporal and psychic dissonance, their sociocultural, intellectual, spiritual, artistic, sexual, and/or emotional development. As a result, the novel of formation will be a particularly relevant backdrop against which to examine the innovations and revolutions introduced by women novelists in post-war Spain.

By the same token, changing sociohistorical circumstances and discrete artistic visions have shaped these novels, and the differences between them may well be more significant than the resemblances.