Elisa Hall de Asturias
| Elisa Hall de Asturias | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
María Laura Elisa Hall Sánchez 26 February 1900 Guatemala City, Guatemala |
| Died | 20 May 1982 (aged 82) Guatemala City, Guatemala |
| Nationality | Guatemalan |
| Occupation | writer |
| Years active | 1937–1939 |
| Notable work | Semilla de mostaza |
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.
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. This cultural environment surrounded Hall, as her father was a founding member of the Guatemalan Academy of Language, a professor, and a poet; her grandfather, Edward Hall, was a British poet and pianist; her cousins Francisco Fernández Hall and Máximo Soto Hall were writers and poets; and her niece Francisca Fernández Hall Zúñiga was the first female graduate in all of Central America to complete her Civil Engineering degree. Fernández Hall earned her distinction at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
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.
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