Elisa Hall de Asturias

Elisa Hall de Asturias (26 February 1900 – 20 May 1982) was a Guatemalan writer and intellectual. In the 1930s, she wrote a book Semilla de mostaza that became the source of controversy for nearly 70 years. Anti-feminist biases at the time that she wrote led to the conclusion that she could not have written the book, which had become a mainstay of Guatemala's literary heritage. In 2011 and 2012, new research into the controversy verified that she was the author of the work.

Biography María Laura Elisa Hall Sánchez was born on 26 February 1900 in Guatemala City, Guatemala to poet, translator and academic, Guillermo Francisco Hall Avilés and Elisa Sánchez. She was the only daughter in a family of five brothers and grew up in an environment of intellectuals dedicated to education and literature. She began to write at the age of twelve, encouraged by her brother Guillermo Roberto Hall, who was a poet.

From an early age, Hall had a wide correspondence with writers and her scrapbook shows that between 1911 and 1917 she saved letters from Salvadoran poet Juan J. Cañas, Alberto Masferrer, Fences Redish (pseudonym of Dr. Manuel Valladares Rubio), Salomón de la Selva, Baronesa de Wilson, José Ramón Uriarte, and others. her cousins Francisco Fernández Hall and Máximo Soto Hall were writers and poets; and her niece Francisca Fernández Hall Zúñiga

During the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the family was forced into exile, going to Honduras and El Salvador. Hall's father had been born in Comayagua, Honduras. The family arrived in San Salvador in August 1913, and was there when the catastrophic earthquake of 1917 occurred. The earthquake caused her family to return to Guatemala, but in December of that year, Guatemala City suffered an earthquake with aftershocks that continued into early 1918 that destroyed the city. Hall's desire was to go to medical school, but she was not allowed admittance, as a female.

According to her family, Hall was ahead of her time. She was the first female to obtain a driver's license in Guatemala and held the tenth license ever issued. She is also believed to have been the first female pilot.

Literary works

Madre maya In the mid-1920s, Hall wrote an unpublished novel called Madre maya (Mother Maya). During the controversy over Semilla de Mostaza, Napoleón Viera Altamirano, director of the newspaper Diario de Hoy de San Salvador stated that he had known since 1928 of Hall's writing Madre Maya from discussions about it with Alberto Masferrer.

Semilla de Mostaza Hall documented in her diary that she began work on Semilla de Mostaza "5 February 1937 and ended on 3 February 1938, at 3:36 in the afternoon". Because during the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico Castañeda very little publishing could be done without government sanction, Hall's father presented the first chapters of his daughter's book to the Guatemalan Language Academy in May 1937, hoping to gain support for publication. The president endorsed publishing the novel and Hall's father and brother Guillermo helped set the typescript. that Miguel Ángel Asturias served as a "ghost writer"; or that Hall did write the book. In 2011, the Spanish philologist Gabriela Quirante Amores, after three years of living in Guatemala and a year of study of the Mostaza series and the first novel of Hall, concluded that Hall did write the books. She criticized the sexism of the thirties era in Guatemala, which denied women the right to create and have recognition for their abilities. In 2012, Quirante's Master's thesis Semilla de mostaza (1938): polémica sobre la autoría y análisis interpretativo de la obra (2012) was presented to a literary tribunal Estudios de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana of the Universidad de Alicante which recognized the proof of authorship.

Aftermath Though originally Hall had planned a third installment of the series, she grew a tired of the attacks of the small group of detractors, lost interest in writing and devoted herself to oil painting, watercolor and her gardening. In 1947, she helped organize the Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres (First Inter-American Congress of Women) held on 27 August 1947 in Guatemala City, which had as one of its main themes equality of men and women.

She was 60 when she began studying French and spent her time reading books, studying encyclopedias and magazines. She also wrote some free verse poetry. The justification of her authorship of Semilla de Mostaza became an obsession for Hall and in 1981, she made a compilation of the sources that she had consulted to document her work.

Hall died in Guatemala City on 20 May 1982 surrounded by her family.