Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1982, Isabel Allende published her debut novel, The House of the Spirits. The characters are based on her family, and the story reflects Chile’s 20th Century history, including the 1973 military coup in which her relative, President Salvador Allende, was overthrown.
The book began as a letter to her dying grandfather, but it grew into an epic multi-generational story.
The House of the Spirits was an international bestseller and made Isabel one of the most renowned novelists in Latin America’s rich literary history. She speaks to Ben Henderson.
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(Photo: Isabel Allende in 1986. Credit: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:10.4 | Hello and welcome to Witness History from the BBC World Service with me, Ben Henderson. |
| 0:16.1 | Regular listeners may want to skip forward now, but for any newcomers, on witness history, |
| 0:20.5 | we tell the biggest |
| 0:21.3 | stories in modern history by interviewing someone who was there. New episodes come out every weekday, |
| 0:26.7 | so please do subscribe and you'll never miss out. Today, I'm speaking to one of the most |
| 0:31.7 | widely read Spanish language authors in history, Isabel Aende, about the book that made her name, The House of the Spirits. |
| 0:39.5 | We start in Chile's capital, Santiago, in the 1940s. |
| 0:43.8 | My grandmother and three other women, they would sit around this very heavy oak table and call the spirits. |
| 0:52.4 | Isabel was born into a well-connected Chilean family in 1942, |
| 0:56.8 | but her father abandoned them when she was young, |
| 0:59.5 | so she was forced to move in with her unusual grandparents. |
| 1:02.7 | They were experimenting also with telepathy |
| 1:05.2 | and trying to move objects without touching them. |
| 1:09.0 | Telepathy was funny because the Morla sisters lived in the other end of the city |
| 1:13.1 | and they would send each other kitchen recipes telepathically. |
| 1:18.7 | They never worked. |
| 1:20.2 | Not because telepathy doesn't work, but because they were horrible cooks. |
| 1:24.7 | But the legend is that my grandmother was magical. She instilled that in me, that there are many |
| 1:31.7 | dimensions of reality, that the dead and the living walk side by side. My grandmother died very |
| 1:40.9 | soon, and it became a house of mourning. My grandfather dressed in black from head to |
| 1:46.6 | toe. He painted some of the furniture black, and there were no flowers, no music, no radio, |
... |
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