Quote by María Luisa Bombal: “Reality bores me. I prefer my dreams.”

For a woman whose real life offered little freedom or agency, the inner world of imagination and dreams was the only space truly her own. This is not escapism for its own sake — it is a claim that for those trapped in suffocating realities, the interior life is the only form of freedom available.

Bombal published The Shrouded Woman in 1938, a novel narrated by a woman from within her own coffin, looking back on her unlived possibilities. She was living in Buenos Aires, which had become a refuge for Chilean writers, and her experimental fiction was radical in its willingness to enter the irrational, dreamlike interior of female experience.

Chilean novelist and short story writer whose surrealist fiction explored the inner lives and desires of women trapped in suffocating social roles. Her 1935 novella La última niebla is considered a landmark of Latin American modernist fiction and a precursor to magical realism.