(The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from “Jane Eyre” onward.) Even before her mistress’s death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter’s wife who gradually goes mad. These elements are all present in her latest novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval.
In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the real: in one painting, a fat general nonchalantly shares a table with headless men in tuxedos.
The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. It was an art critic who coined the term “magic realism,” to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Germany.
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