To Keep the House and Shut One’s Mouth

Since the publication of her first works in the early 1960s, Spanish writer Clara Janés (1940-) has produced more than fifty works of literature, spanning genres, languages, and even media. She has published more than thirty books of poetry, seven novels, four book-length essays, two memoirs, several biographies, and numerous works of short fiction. She regularly contributes essays and commentary to major Spanish newspapers and participates actively in the online literary journal Adamar: Revista de creación. Additionally a photographer, musician, translator, and literary critic, at center Janés is a multifaceted creator; she is one of the most important Spanish artists and intellectuals of our times. As sign of her importance, she was inaugurated into the Spanish Royal Academy in 2015, one of only ten 10 women members to this day. Unlike many writers of her generation, however, in her work Janés has not tended to focus primarily on the turbulent Spanish political scene of the twentieth century. She has focuses instead on universal issues such as the nature of women's writing and female expression in particular. In doing so, she has consistently looked outside her country of origin, to the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She has won international awards for her outward-looking work, reflected in To Keep the House and Shut One's Mouth.

Throughout this recent treatise, published in Madrid, Spain in 2015 (Siruela), the great Spanish writer Clara Janés (poet, essayist, novelist) and esteemed member of the elite Spanish Royal Academy (2015), accompanies us on a journey throughout different cultures and moments of time, from early years up to the present period, focusing on relatively unknown but significant writings by women.
In a series of essays published here, she highlights unstudied literary texts written by women beginning with the first feminine poetic voice, the Akkadian High Priestess Enheduanna, and then moving on to Sappho and female Greek and Roman writers, and subsequently to Arab-Andalusian, Medieval and Renaissance, and Castilian early women writers, finishing up with works of contemporary Afghan Women poets.
This extraordinary text presents a significant achievement for Janés, for she establishes the importance of women writers throughout history, many of their texts completely unstudied but extremely valuable. Janés' work becomes a vehicle by which to diffuse this knowledge and also a means to propose a contemporary approach to analysis that helps us return to the past and incorporate it into present and future moments. In doing so, Janés opens up new paths of research and interpretation regarding women's writing and feminism, as she establishes a valid literary-historical perspective for the times. In her text she invites us to look back and examine ancient texts with new eyes and at the same time to discover other more recent ones that are equally valuable and pleasurable.