The Censorship of a Closeted Spain: 
The Case of Elena Fortún  
(1886–1952)
Elena Lindholm
Umeå University, Department of Language Studies, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9997-577X 
elena.lindholm@umu.se
133
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.1 (2023)
This article focuses on how self-censorship and state censorship have shaped 
the literary legacy of the Spanish author of children’s books, Elena Fortún. The 
homosexual closet is presented as a key concept for understanding the impact of 
censorship on the work of a lesbian writer such as Fortún who has contributed 
to various narratives of Spanish femininity over the course of almost a century. 
The first of these is the narrative of gender dissidence during the Second Republic 
(1931–1939); followed by the narrative of the wife and mother belonging to the 
Franco Regime (1939–1975); and finally the LGBTQ inclusiveness of the new 
millennium in Spain (2005–2022). The works included in the analysis are 
varied, spanning from Fortún’s children’s books to her correspondence and 
finally two posthumously published novels. This reading of Fortún’s texts reveals 
how censorship works as a controlling gaze that not only operates from the 
outside, but is also internalized in the individual, maintaining the doors of the 
homosexual closet closed from the inside.
Keywords: Spanish literature / Spanish women writers / Fortún, Elena / sexual identity / 
lesbianism / Franco regime / censorship
The name Elena Fortún (pseud. of Encarnación Aragoneses Urquijo 
1886–1952) is well known in Spain from the covers of her children’s 
books, and especially her series about the curious and unruly girl char-
acter Celia. Until recently, however, the person behind the name Elena 
Fortún was quite unknown to most of the readers who had grown up 
with the characters from her books. This changed in 2016, more than half 
a century after her death, when two literary scholars, Nuria Capdevila-
Argüelles and María Jesús Fraga, decided to posthumously publish two of 
Fortún’s manuscripts that revealed her hidden life as a lesbian.1
1 The pseudonym Elena Fortún derived from a character in a novel by the author’s 
husband Eusebio Gorbea, Los mil años de Elena Fortún: Magerit (The thousand years of 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
134
Fortún’s literary career begins in Madrid in 1929 with her debut as 
author of the children’s series about Celia, at the same time as she lived 
a secret life as part of Madrid’s sapphic circles. Both her life and career 
changed drastically in 1939 when she went into exile in Argentina due 
to the installation of the fascist Franco regime in Spain (1939–1975). 
From her exile, she continued publishing her Celia books in Spain 
under the pressure of censorship in her home country. The final years 
of Fortún’s trajectory take us into a new millennium with the publi-
cation of her posthumously published novels, Oculto sendero (Hidden 
Pathway, 2016) and El pensionado de Santa Casilda (Saint Casilda’s 
Pension, 2022). The first, Oculto sendero, has been interpreted as an 
autobiographical novel that depicts the life of a young homosexual 
woman in Spain. Its protagonist, a painter named María Luisa Arroyo, 
lives a life that in many ways parallels the author’s own. El pensionado 
de Santa Casilda portrays a group of young women attending a board-
ing school in Madrid at the beginning of the twentieth century, some 
of whom have lesbian love relationships, sometimes simultaneously to 
their engagements with male partners. As Capdevila-Argüelles explains 
in her introduction to the novel, the young women portrayed here 
bear many similarities to the members of the sapphic circles that Elena 
Fortún frequented in Madrid during the years prior to the Franco 
regime. If the focus of Oculto sendero was on the hardships of living as 
a lesbian in a heteronormative society, El pensionado de Santa Casilda 
is more focused on the relationships between the women and includes 
joyful and explicit references to their love lives.
The exposing of Fortún’s life as a lesbian through the posthumous 
publication of Oculto sendero in 2016 can be described using the well-
known metaphor of “coming out of the closet,” a saying that highlights 
homosexuality as a concealed condition, and the breaking of this con-
cealment as a public act. In the case of Elena Fortún, it would perhaps 
be fairer to say that she was brought out of her closet, since it happened 
more than half a century after her death. As Capdevila-Agüelles has 
shown in her studies of the author, the closet is also a useful concept 
for shedding critical light on the life and work of an author who in 
many ways both defied and conformed to the gender norms of her 
times (Capdevila-Argüelles, “The Dissidence”). The aim of this article 
is, on the one hand, to develop an understanding of how the author’s 
closeted condition was formed by censorship, but also how censorship 
Elena Fortún: Magerit, 1922). Throughout this article, the pseudonym will be used to 
refer to the author, since she also used it in her private life, for example when signing 
personal letters.
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
135
contributed to integrate Fortún’s work into three different narratives of 
Spanish femininity, belonging to three different versions of the Spanish 
nation: from the gender dissidence of the progressive Spanish Republic 
(1931–1939), through the Catholic feminine values of the Franco 
regime (1939–1975), to finally arrive at the open closet of LGTBQ-
inclusive policies that arrived with the new millennium in Spain.2
In her queer theoretical classic Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky 
Sedgwick points to the closet as a metaphorical representation of the 
binary hetero/homo, describing it as one of the major nodes of thought 
that has structured modern society. According to Sedgwick, the whole 
idea of the closet is built on the need to silence—or censor—certain 
sexual behaviors, creating the closet as a spectacle on which author-
ity is being manifested: “… the establishment of the spectacle of the 
homosexual closet as a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, 
of authority—someone else’s authority—over world-making discursive 
terrain that extends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homo-
sexual.” (Sedgwick 230)
The rhetorical community of authority that Sedgwick refers to is 
described as one that does not include the closeted homosexual. Rather, 
it is “someone else’s authority”—in our case, the Spanish nation and 
its narratives of femininity. To pinpoint the way that Elena Fortún has 
been both included in and excluded from this community, I turn to 
Benedict Anderson’s idea of the modern nation as an imagined com-
munity, a rhetorical construct built on shared stories and images that 
create the illusion of sameness within a nation. However, as Anderson 
stresses in Imagined Communities, the idea of the nation is also depen-
dent on the suppression of the narratives that cannot be allowed to 
have a place in the formation of the nation as one people (Anderson 
1–7; 187–206). In the case of homosexuality, Sedgwick’s idea of the 
closet might represent this suppressed narrative of the nation, the homo 
that needs to be hidden so that its imagined counterpart, the hetero, 
may come to the fore as the only possible, universal sexuality.
In Fortún’s case, censorship has been one of the foremost guarantors 
of the homosexual closet that conditioned her trajectory as an author, 
2 In recent years, Elena Fortún and her female contemporaries have provided mate-
rial for a renewed interest in Spanish popular culture through the lives and endeavors 
of the groundbreaking Spanish women who questioned gender norms and explored 
new ways of living and loving during the first four decades of the twentieth century. 
Examples of this include TV series based on their lives, such as Las chicas del cable 
(Cable Girls, Netflix 2017–2020), and the documentary Las sinsobrero (The Hatless 
Women, RTVE 2015–2021).
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
136
both during her lifetime and after her death. However, the workings 
of the censoring mechanisms that kept her inside of the closet are not 
easily placed outside of it, since it is difficult to pinpoint specific cen-
soring actors that would have had direct influence over her decisions 
as an author. Rather, the way that censorship is interiorized in the les-
bian subject in Fortún’s texts resembles the panopticism described by 
Michel Foucault as a cornerstone of the modern idea of discipline, an 
invisible authority that is not directly seen by the controlled subject, but 
always present as an imagined controlling gaze (Foucault 199–230). In 
the following paragraphs, we will observe how censorship is manifested 
in Fortún’s texts: sometimes as a generalized and invisible controlling 
state, sometimes in the form of external actors such as family members, 
but mostly as self-censorship, an interiorized control that keeps the 
walls of the lesbian closet intact from within.
The gender dissidence and open secrets of republican Madrid 
(1931–1939)
The late 1920s and early 1930s in Spain, when Elena Fortún started her 
career as an author of children’s books, was dominated by the liberal 
and left-wing political coalitions of the Spanish Second Republic that 
was proclaimed in 1931 and ended in 1939 after a bloody civil war. 
This period was characterized by progressive reforms that changed the 
conditions for women and girls in the country, giving them rights to 
vote, to divorce and to education. During these years, Elena Fortún 
was an integral part of the feminist movements that promoted such 
reforms, for example at the Lyceum Club for women in Madrid, which 
she attended together with other salient intellectuals of the 1920s and 
1930s (Leggott). In public life, Fortún was a married woman, living 
a heterosexual life as a wife and mother, but in the 1920s—the same 
decade when she started to publish stories for children in the press—
she also started to frequent the sapphic circles of Madrid (Capdevila-
Argüelles, “Introducción” [2022] 39–63)
In many ways, the girl character Celia that Fortún created in her 
first book for children, Celia, lo que dice (What Celia Says, 1929), and 
then continued to recreate in several more books during the 1930s, 
personified the gender dissidence that characterized the Madrilenian 
feminist communities of the Second Republic. In the books that 
Fortún published in the Celia series during this period, the young 
female protagonist constantly defends her position as an individual on 
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
137
her own terms, questions the rules of adults around her and defies gen-
der norms. Celia also displays many of the characteristics of the mod-
ern figure of the New Girl that appeared in Western culture at the turn 
of the twentieth century as an ideal of a reformed girlhood: a girl who 
defends her rights to an independent self, who studies, plays and ques-
tions traditional norms of feminine obedience to patriarchal authority 
(Driscoll; Puchau de Lecea; Lindholm). There is also an adult character 
in the books from this period who stands out as a representative of the 
modern woman, namely Celia’s mother Pilar de Montalbán, a woman 
who spends a lot of her time outside the house instead of dedicating 
it to her family. In fact, she resembles the author herself by attending 
the Lyceum Club, just like Elena Fortún did, to have tea and discuss 
important topics of the day with other members of Madrid’s feminist 
intelligentsia (Fortún, Celia, lo que dice 74; Martín Gaite 17–20).
Despite the disdain for homosexuals in Spanish society, urban life 
in the Spanish capital during the decades prior to the Franco regime 
offered small spaces of a certain tolerance towards women who pushed 
the boundaries of ladylike behavior, especially among circles of avant-
garde artists and authors, where pushing boundaries was part of the 
common artistic project. On the other hand, the left-wing and liberal 
movements that dominated the political life of the Second Republic 
were not necessarily harbors of tolerance towards homosexuals 
(Carretón Cano). In sum, despite her social life among the progressives 
of Madrid’s feminist avant-garde and her success with the Celia books, 
there was a secrecy surrounding Fortún’s life as a lesbian, even among 
the more politically progressive communities of which she was a part. 
The lesbians who engaged in the activities at the Residencia de Señoritas 
(Residence for young ladies) or the Lyceum Club in Madrid often met 
with prejudice from other women who frequented these hotspots for 
development of feminist thought, who expressed open disdain towards 
what they perceived as their “masculinized” fellow feminists (“mascu-
linizados,” Moreno-Lago 228).
Eva Moreno-Lago describes the strategy that lesbians among 
Madrid’s feminists adopted to survive as “an open secret” (“un secreto 
a voces,” Moreno-Lago 219), keeping the knowledge of their intimate 
relations within a tight web of sympathizers. Sedgwick also alludes to 
the notion of the open secret in her definition of the homosexual closet, 
and in fact puts forward homosexuality as “the open secret” of modern 
society, emphasizing homosexuality as something that must be hidden 
and yet visible in order to define heterosexual normativity (Sedgwick 
22). In this manner, the presence of women who loved women within 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
138
Madrid’s intellectual circles made the homosexual closet visible in the 
urban space as an unsettling presence of sexual others among the oth-
erwise heteronormative feminists of the intelligentsia. They were talked 
about and named but had to be kept hidden in their closet to keep the 
narrative of the progressive Spanish femininity of the Second Republic 
within the realms of heteronormativity.
Fortún’s posthumously published autobiographical novel, Oculto 
sendero, provides an insight into this spectacle of the closet that sur-
rounded female homosexuality in Spanish urban life at the beginning 
of the twentieth century, where self-censorship seems to have been a 
strategy used to handle the strong attraction to other women that she 
describes in the novel. The love relationships depicted in Oculto sendero 
in many ways seem to mirror descriptions of the lesbian communities 
of Madrid in which Elena Fortún took part, and cross-dressing is per-
haps the most salient marker of sapphic identity in the novel. Playing 
with gender identities through clothing was indeed an integral part of 
avant-garde aesthetics during the 1920s and 1930s, both in Madrid and 
elsewhere in Europe, and as Purificació Mascarell states in her analysis 
of Oculto sendero, clothes and appearance play an important part in the 
novel as a means of representing gender norms and the protagonist’s 
yearning to overcome them (Mascarell).
In Oculto sendero, Elena Fortún depicts the presence of homosexual-
ity as an open secret, where censorship and silencing on the part of the 
protagonist’s family members work as markers of the limits between 
permitted heterosexuality and forbidden homosexuality, where their 
censoring actions indicate the limits of the homosexual closet. One pas-
sage in the novel where this becomes evident depicts the protagonist—
Fortún’s alter ego María Luisa—as a child accompanying her family 
to a hotel restaurant where they are celebrating the parents’ wedding 
anniversary. The scene begins with María Luisa’s mother asking her 
daughter to put on a traditionally girlish dress to wear to the celebra-
tion, which María Luisa objects to. She prefers a sailor’s uniform “with 
a hat and all” (“con gorra y todo,” Fortún, Oculto sendero 74), a pro-
posal to witch her mother responds with threats of sending her daugh-
ter to boarding school if she does not keep quiet: “—Let’s see how you 
shut up! Right now, girl! Look, if you carry on like this I’ll send you to 
a boarding school tomorrow … Did you hear? Shut up I said! Don’t let 
me hear you anymore … Go away!” (74)3
3 “—¡Vamos a ver cómo te callas! ¡Ahora mismo, niña! Mira que si sigues así te 
mando mañana a un colegio interna … ¿Has oído? ¡A callar he dicho! Que no te 
oiga más … ¡Vete!” (All translations from Spanish are my own.)
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
139
With harsh words and explicit threats, the mother gets her way, and 
María Luisa wears the dress while the family has dinner at the restaurant. 
Both María Luisa’s dress and the image of the two parents celebrating 
their marriage in the presence of their children stand out as symbols of 
the traditional, heterosexual nuclear family. The sense of heterosexual 
completeness at the dinner in the hotel is however suddenly broken 
when María Luisa is struck by the arrival of two young women. One of 
them is dressed in elegant, traditionally male attire, with a short hair-
cut. The women are described as elegant and rich, but also as breaking 
social norms, smoking and crossing their legs in public at a “time when 
women wore dresses to their feet, and no decent woman crossed her 
legs in public” (83).4 The narrator, the pre-adolescent María Luisa, also 
hints at an intimate relationship between the two women who “looked 
at each other without saying anything, and in their gaze there was 
something new and incomprehensible to me” (83).5 The boundary that 
is manifested between the heteronormative family and María Luisa’s 
homoerotic perception of the two women is reinforced by her family 
members who talk disparagingly of the women and of their uncon-
ventional behavior. As the narrator, María Luisa secretly takes the two 
women’s side, but does so silently. In the contrast between the family’s 
open disdain towards the women and María Luisa’s silence, Fortún 
manages to illustrate how the heterosexual family works as a censoring 
authority that turns any norm-breaking expressions of gender or sexu-
ality into a visible spectacle by naming them openly as deviant. María 
Luisa’s defense of the two women, on the other hand, is manifested in 
silence, as if kept in secrecy behind the doors of the homosexual closet.
The passage where María Luisa watches the two modern women in 
the restaurant stands out as the pivotal moment where the protagonist 
steps onto the hidden sapphic life path of the novel’s title, constantly 
silencing herself in order to survive in a world run according to the 
rules of heteronormativity. Elena Fortún herself married at the age of 
20, and marriage is the only possible life path presented to her alter ego 
in Oculto sendero. Through her fictitious double, Fortún explores the 
hardships of a lesbian woman who is forced into a heterosexual rela-
tionship—for example, her experience of her wedding night, narrated 
from María Luisa’s perspective:
4 “… época en la que las mujeres llevaban los vestidos hasta los pies, y ninguna 
mujer decente cruzaba las piernas en público.” 
5 “… se miraban sin decir nada, y en su mirada había algo nuevo e incomprensible 
para mí.” 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
140
I stepped out onto the balcony that had a view over a patio and looked down 
at the ground … To think, if I were to let myself fall! It was the third floor and 
I would be killed. All finished! How wonderful! No husband, no house, no 
children … What a relief! […] And what did it matter? My body, intact the 
day before, felt outraged … (302)6
In the novel, María Luisa is frequently urged to marry by her family 
and friends, who repeatedly sing the praises of heterosexual love. María 
Luisa sometimes tries to tell the people around her about her feelings, 
her wish to pursue a career as a painter rather than to marry, and her 
instinctive revulsion at the thought of sex with men. At times, these 
passages where María Luisa questions the idea of traditional marriage 
as the only path for her to follow resemble the young Celia’s objections 
when adults make plans for her, or request that she behave in a tradi-
tionally girlish manner against her will. However, there is no room for 
this kind of youthful rebellion in the adult life that Fortún creates for 
María Luisa in Oculto sendero. Rather, the message María Luisa receives 
from other women, and from the romance novels she reads, is that of 
heterosexual love as an all-encompassing truth. An example of this ap-
pears in a passage when María Luisa, before her wedding, tries to share 
her worries with her aunt Manuelita:
—Well … I don’t like men …
—I’m glad! If you like your husband, that is more than enough for you. (301)7
The aunt’s response indicates monogamous, heterosexual sex as the 
only option for a woman, but it also illustrates how women in María 
Luisa’s family act as censors who keep any thought of escaping hetero-
sexual monogamy from being uttered. When faced with this impossi-
bility of even expressing a thought that goes beyond the boundaries of 
marriage, the protagonist of Oculto sendero accepts a closeted existence 
within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage as the only possible way 
of life for a lesbian woman.
6 “Me asomé al balcón que daba sobre un patio y miré al fondo … ¡Si me dejara 
caer! Era tercer piso y me mataría. ¡Todo acabado! ¡Qué bien! Ya ni marido, ni casa, 
ni hijos … ¡Qué descanso! […] Y ¿Qué importaba? Mi cuerpo, intacto la víspera, se 
sentía ultrajado …”
7 “—Pues … que a mí no me gustan los hombres … —¡Me alegro! Con que te 
guste tu marido te basta y te sobra.”
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
141
The catholic feminine values of the Franco regime (1939–
1975)
When Franco took power in Spain in 1939, the small pockets of rel-
ative tolerance that lesbians had found in Madrid during the 1930s 
disappeared completely, and the strict heteronormativity expressed by 
María Luisa’s family in Oculto sendero became official policy, enforced 
by the regime through state censorship. The same year, Elena Fortún 
and her husband fled to Argentina, mainly because of her husband 
being a member of the defeated Republican army. In her biography of 
Elena Fortún, Marisol Dorao describes how the community of women 
intellectuals that had gathered around the Lyceum Club was scattered 
in exile, finding refuge in France, Mexico, Chile, or Argentina (Dorao 
166). As Sarah Leggott explains, the Lyceum Club as a vibrant hub 
for the development of feminist thought had since its opening been 
criticized by the Church and other conservative elements of society. 
With Franco’s takeover, the club was closed, its records destroyed, and 
the building that housed it was taken over by the Women’s Section 
(Sección Femenina) of the fascist party, Falange. If life in the closet had 
already been a reality for lesbian women before 1939, its doors now 
closed on any woman who aspired to an existence beyond the tradi-
tional Catholic ideals defended by the regime. Kathleen Richmond has 
pointed out the pivotal role of the fascist Women’s Section in their ef-
forts to remodel the public image of Spanish femininity. As Richmond 
puts it, characteristic to the new dictatorial regime, was its “determina-
tion to turn back the clock […] on the lives of women” (Richmond 14). 
Together with representatives of the Catholic Church, the Women’s 
Section with the regime’s support, wanted to shift the paradigm from 
the politically active and educated woman that had been promoted by 
the feminist movements of the Second Republic, to a more traditional 
ideal of the girl as future mother and wife (Richmond 14–51).
Like other totalitarian regimes, under Franco the state used cen-
sorship to maintain control over the stories that construe the nation’s 
shared narrative. The national narrative was to be kept under the aus-
pices of the ruler to prevent alternative stories from threatening the one 
narrative that justifies the regime’s power over the people. According 
to Jesús A. Martínez Martín, who has studied the Franco regime’s 
influence on publishing, Catholicism has never penetrated the total-
ity of Spanish society in such a profound manner as during the first 
and most repressive two decades of the Franco regime. Practically all 
printed matter had to pass through the censorship apparatus of the 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
142
regime, but the criteria for application of the censorship law remained 
imprecise and vaguely formulated around issues regarding sexual mor-
als, Catholic dogma, and the political principles of the fascist Falange. 
When it was carried out, censorship was at times meticulous and severe, 
at others more benevolent and mild (Martínez Martín 38). Even if the 
state was the main censorship authority in Spain during the Franco 
regime, other groups of interest could also act as censors by banning 
texts or other forms of cultural expression, such as representatives of 
the Church or other political and religious organizations with close ties 
to the regime. Altogether, the different actors who had an influence on 
state censorship in Spain during the Franco years formed a complex 
and non-transparent web of relations (Martínez Martín; Thompson).
The indirect and unpredictable ways in which the mechanisms of 
censorship interfered in the publishing strategies of Elena Fortún, illus-
trates the entangled web of relations that Jesús A. Martínez Martín 
observes in the censorship apparatus of the Franco regime. Instead of 
transparency and predictability, the fear of an unpredictable authority 
and of the punishments that awaited those who transgressed its invis-
ible limits caused authors and publishers to integrate the censorship 
apparatus into their own view of the work at hand. Fortún’s docu-
ments from this period testify to an interiorized adaptation to the new 
standards, one similar to the internal senses of shame and distancing 
that Foucault describes in the context of modern penal systems as the 
interiorized authoritarian gaze of the panopticon, where the invisibility 
and arbitrariness of surveillance turns the controlling authority into a 
powerful fiction in the prisoner’s mind (Foucault 204–206). To grasp 
the mechanism of censorship and how it affected Elena Fortún’s situ-
ation as an author during these years, it is helpful to put her published 
work from the post-war period in contrast to her unpublished manu-
scripts and letters.
Looking at Fortún’s publishing record during the Franco years up 
until her death in 1952, the all-encompassing and unpredictable cen-
sorship culture fostered by the regime and its supporters seems to have 
added yet another layer to the young lesbian woman’s self-censorship, 
which her posthumously published novel Oculto sendero testifies to. 
Fortún published just a few more books in her popular Celia series in 
Spain after 1939, and by the publication of the last one in 1950, she 
had already returned to Spain from her exile in Argentina two years 
earlier in 1948. If the curious, self-asserted girl had been the ideal that 
shaped the character of Celia during the era of the Second Republic, the 
Franco regime brought with it new standards to follow. In the books 
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
143
from this period, Celia grows up into a young woman, more adapted 
to the new regime’s narrative of Spanish femininity. In contrast to the 
mischievous girl from the earlier books, this more mature version of 
Celia holds the maternal values fostered by both the Church and the 
Women’s Section of Falange.
The first Celia book to hit the Spanish market after the fall of the 
Second Republic appeared as early as 1939, entitled Celia madrecita 
(Celia, Little Mother). Here, Celia’s mother has died, and Celia is now 
an adolescent, taking on the maternal responsibilities of the household. 
As Capdevilla-Argüelles points out in her re-edition of Celia madre-
cita, Fortún not only reshapes the rebellious girl character from the 
earlier books, but also symbolically represents the downfall of the mod-
ern Spanish woman with the death of Celia’s mother, who had been 
a fictitious member of the likewise defunct Lyceum Club (Capdevila-
Argüelles, “Introducción” [2015] 7–17).
Five years passed between Celia madrecita and Celia institutriz en 
América (Celia, Teacher in America), where Celia becomes a teacher 
for poor children in Argentina. Despite the caring characteristics that 
Fortún would continue to foster in Celia as a young teacher, the work-
ing and intellectually developed Celia, who also has a boyfriend in the 
book, apparently did not conform to the standards of the Church in 
Spain. The book was not formally banned, but in 1945 the organization 
Consejo Superior de Mujeres de Acción Católica (Women’s Superior 
Council of Catholic Action) classified it together with Celia en el cole-
gio (Celia at School, 1934) as “inconvenientes” (inappropriate) in their 
catalogue of children’s books (Consejo Superior de Mujeres de Acción 
Católica 147).8 This catalogue, produced by religious organizations 
close to the regime, was intended to guide authors and editors in the 
production of morally, religiously and patriotically correct children’s 
literature (García Padrino 42–43). Indeed, the indexing of prohibited 
or “inappropriate” books has a long history within the Catholic Church 
in Spain, where the listing of texts deemed threatening to the Catholic 
doctrine was an integral part of the inquisition (Petley 34–35).
It is hard to establish whether the inclusion of Fortún’s books in the 
list of the Consejo Superior de Mujeres de Acción Católica was pivotal 
to the decisions made regarding the publication of the last two books in 
the Celia series, El cuaderno de Celia (Celia’s Notebook, 1947) and Celia 
8 None of Fortún’s Celia books was included in the highest category in the cata-
logue, “recommended,” but both Celia, lo que dice and Celia madrecita were included 
in the second highest category as “acceptable,” whereas Celia en el mundo and Celia y 
sus amigos were included in the third category as “tolerable.”
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
144
se casa (Celia Gets Married, 1950). Both these books suited the regime’s 
standards of religiosity and traditional feminine values. The first, El 
cuaderno de Celia, depicts Celia’s conversations on matters of virtue and 
religion with a nun, Sor Inés, who Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles identi-
fies as a representation of the last love in Elena Fortún’s life, Inés Field, 
whom she met in Argentina (Capdevila-Argüelles, “Introducción” 
[2017] 17). From Fortún’s return to Spain in 1948 up until her death 
in 1952, she maintained close contact with Inés Field in Argentina by 
correspondence. The religious turn in the Celia series with El cuaderno 
de Celia is mirrored in Fortún’s letters to Field during these last years of 
her life, of which some are full of regrets and self-contempt concerning 
her earlier way of life.9
Judging from the letters to Inés Field, the censorship of the Spanish 
regime was both an external reality to be dealt with when sending or 
receiving mail, and something that became manifest as an interiorized, 
ever-present, and sometimes even paranoiac sense of being watched. 
Fortún’s correspondence reveals how the pressure of censorship affected 
both her personal life and the literary work that she published, or chose 
not to publish, during the Franco years. For example, the fear of state 
censorship is to be perceived in Fortún’s letters to Field in Argentina 
straight after her return to Madrid in 1948, where she was expecting 
to be accompanied by her husband, Eusebio Gorbea. In a letter from 
December 16, Fortún gives Field instructions for helping her husband 
to sort out which papers and manuscripts he may take with him from 
Argentina to Spain.10 Among the manuscripts that should not accom-
pany him on the journey is the one containing Celia en la revolución 
(Celia in the Revolution), yet another unpublished book in the Celia 
series that portrays Celia and her family during the civil war.11 Among 
the manuscripts that Fortún had left behind in Argentina were also 
those containing explicit references to lesbianism, posthumously pub-
lished as Oculto sendero and El pensionado de Santa Casilda. However, 
Fortún never mentions them explicitly in her letter to Field. Instead, 
she writes: “It is possible there are some books that will not pass the 
censorship. It is easy to recognize them.” (Fortún, Sabes quién soy 
9 The letters from Fortún to Field have recently been published in two volumes, 
Sabes quién soy and Mujer doliente (You know who I am and Aching woman, both 2021). 
Unfortunately, there are no records of Field’s corresponding letters to Fortún.
10 The day after this letter to Inés Field was written, on December 17, 1948, 
Fortún’s husband Eusebio Gorbea committed suicide in Argentina.
11 Celia en la revolución was published for the first time in 1987.
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
145
60–61)12 The trust that Fortún shows in her friend may be interpreted 
as a sign of their close friendship, and that Field would probably have 
had knowledge of the possible lesbian content of some of the manu-
scripts that Fortún had left behind when she returned to Spain.
The all-encompassing fear of the regime and its censorial power 
expresses itself in a generalized suspicion throughout Fortún’s corre-
spondence to Inés Field, as in a letter sent from Orange, New Jersey 
on April 11, 1950, during a stay there with her son and niece. In it, 
she expresses her concern that the censorship of the Spanish regime 
might even extend to the letters Inés sends to her from Argentina to the 
United States: “I no longer have any doubt that your correspondence is 
being tapped … I don’t know by whom or why.” (Fortún, Sabes quién 
soy 255)13
The pressure on Fortún to adapt her last Celia book, Celia se casa, 
to the standards of the regime can also be seen in her correspondence 
to Inés Field, where Fortún gives an account of the negotiations with 
her publisher Manuel Aguilar in Spain. In a letter from Barcelona on 
February 5, 1951, she mentions the manuscript for Celia, bibliotecaria 
(Celia the Librarian) “that I did not finish because Aguilar insisted on 
marrying her straight away” (Fortún, Mujer doliente 184).14 Fortún had 
already made plans for finishing the series with a book where Celia ends 
up working as a librarian. Among Fortún’s unpublished manuscripts, 
there was an unfinished manuscript for Celia, bibliotecaria, but instead 
of finishing the series by giving Celia a profession, Fortún complied 
with the demands of her editor; judging from the letters, she even seems 
to have accepted this fate for her famous girl character as a suitable one. 
Celia se casa appears as a combination of what Yuval Beniziman would 
term political self-censorship and commercial self-censorship: the first 
being a result of political pressure on the author, in this case the social 
normativity approved by the Franco regime, and the second being the 
will of Fortún’s editor, Aguilar, to please the presumed expectations of 
a Spanish audience who would prefer a married Celia to a working one 
(Beniziman 212–214).
12 “Es possible también que haya algunos libros que no deje pasar la censura. Es 
fácil conocerlos.”
13 “Ya no me cabe ninguna duda de que tu correspondencia está intervenida … no 
sé por quién ni por qué.”
14 “… que no acabé porque se empeñó Aguilar en que había que casarla enseguida.”
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
146
The open closet of a new millennium (2005–2022)
On May 8, 1952, four years after her return to Spain from Argentina, 
Elena Fortún passed away. Continuing our use of the closet as a con-
cept for capturing the censorship and silencing that conditioned Elena 
Fortún’s life as an author, we now observe how the closet doors would 
become even thicker after her death, that was followed by more than 
four decades of public silence regarding the author’s persona. Despite 
of this, her children’s books continued to be read and appreciated by 
young readers in Spain during the last two decades of the Franco re-
gime, without people really knowing much about the person behind 
the name on the book covers. However, in the 1980s, a time when 
Spain had just started its transition to democracy after more than three 
and a half decades of dictatorship, women scholars in Spain started to 
slowly dismantle Elena Fortún’s closet, the walls of censorship that both 
Fortún herself and others around her had built over the years. The first 
of these was Marisol Dorao, one of the many admirers of Fortún’s Celia 
character who by the 1980s had grown up and graduated in literature 
and was seeking out more information on the author for her doctoral 
thesis. As Dorao explains in the prologue to her biography of Fortún, 
finding material about the person behind the name that appeared on the 
beloved Celia books of her childhood was not an easy task.
In her quest to retrieve Elena Fortún’s biographical remains, Dorao 
managed to get in touch with Fortún’s niece in the United States, 
whom she travelled overseas to visit and who gave to her a bag that 
had belonged to Fortún, full of papers and unpublished materials 
(Dorao 11). Dorao’s quest then took her to Argentina, where she vis-
ited the author’s friends from her years in exile, Inés Field and Manuela 
Mur. In the introduction to her edition of Oculto sendero, Nuria 
Capdevila-Argüelles quotes from Dorao’s notebook from her journey 
to Argentina, where she recalls how she got hold of the two manu-
scripts of Oculto sendero and El pensionado de Santa Casilda from a very 
nervous Manuela Mur, who had got them from Inés Field (Capdevila-
Argüelles, “Introducción” [2022] 18–19). Both manuscripts contained 
explicitly lesbian content. They were typed and signed with the name 
Rosa María Castaños, seemingly yet another censoring strategy used by 
Fortún to disguise herself even in the afterlife. However, as Capdevila-
Argüelles states, the style that characterized the manuscripts was 
unequivocally Fortún’s, even down to the grammatical errors, which 
had not yet been corrected as in her other manuscripts. Near the end of 
her life, in a letter to Inés Field dated July 23, 1951, Fortún expressed 
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
147
her wish that her friend in Argentina would burn her manuscripts, a 
final act of self-censorship that would have deprived the world of these 
two rare testimonies from inside the sapphic circles of early twentieth 
century Spain (Fortún, Mujer doliente 224).
Against the explicit wish of her dying friend, Inés Field kept the 
manuscripts for Oculto sendero and El pensionado de Santa Casilda. 
Marisol Dorao never published them, a choice that might be inter-
preted as respecting the author’s wishes without destroying them. 
However, before she died in 2017, Dorao handed the materials over to 
her two younger colleagues, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles and María José 
Fraga, who decided that the time was ripe to open the closet and finally 
let Elena Fortún out. In 2016 they published Oculto sendero, present-
ing it as an autobiographical novel. El pensionado de Santa Casilda, 
published in 2022, is a novel of a more erotically explicit content; part 
of it is attributed to Matilde Ras, who was one of Elena Fortún’s clos-
est friends and perhaps even intimate partner (Capdevila-Argüelles, 
“Introducción” [2022]).
The ethical question remains whether the author’s wishes to have 
the manuscripts destroyed should have been respected after her death 
in 1952. On the other hand, several people who have taken posses-
sion of them over the years have made the same decision not to, from 
Fortún’s friends in Argentina to the literary scholars in Spain into whose 
hands they eventually passed. If the timing was not right for opening 
up Fortún’s homosexual closet when Dorao was working on her biog-
raphy in the 1980s, it certainly was so by the time Oculto sendero and El 
pensionado de Santa Casilda were published. Spain had entered the new 
millennium, taking giant steps away from the intolerance of the Franco 
regime towards acceptance of homosexuality. For example, Spain was 
among the first countries in the world to permit same-sex marriage in 
2005, and in 2022 the Spanish government approved a draft law which 
would allow transgender people to change their legal gender. In light of 
these new policies regarding LGBTQ rights in Spain, Elena Fortún yet 
again provides material for narrating Spanish femininity—this time for 
a Spain of the third millennium, more open to alternative sexual and 
gender identities.
In this article, we have seen how Elena Fortún’s literary work has 
become part of three different narratives of Spanish femininity over 
almost a century, from the 1930s to the present day, but also how these 
narratives hold hidden stories of deviant sexualities or inappropriate 
expressions of gender identity that must be kept inside the homosexual 
closet in order to keep the shared narrative of the nation unified under 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
148
the banner of heterosexuality. Elena Fortún’s closeted existence as an 
author during the 1930s and 1940s illustrates the complex workings of 
modern censorship. It appears as a form of prohibition that may well be 
enforced by authorities within the government or the family, but which 
is also effectively interiorized within the closeted subject’s mind as a 
self-censoring, panoptic mechanism that keeps the doors of the closet 
shut from the inside.
Also, efforts to posthumously bring Elena Fortún out of the closet 
by publishing her unpublished manuscripts appear as a process that 
has run parallel with tendencies in Spain’s public life at the turn of 
the millennium, where Fortún once again offers stories that are ripe to 
be integrated into the contemporary narrative of Spanish femininity. 
Letting stories such as Fortún’s out into the open allows us to study 
the closet as a spectacle, in Sedgwick’s terms, to learn more about the 
censoring mechanisms that keep its walls intact. The knowledge that 
Fortún’s writing provides from inside the closet may eventually even 
help us keep its doors open, never to close again on anyone’s life story 
of same-sex love.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of 
Nationalism. London; New York, NY: Verso, 1991.
Beniziman, Yuval. “The Difficulty of Determining Self-Censorship in Fiction Texts.” 
Self-Censorship in Contexts of Conflict: Theory and Research. Eds. Daniel Bar-Tal et 
al. Cham: Springer, 2017. 207–219.
Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. “Introducción.” El pensionado de Santa Casilda. Authors 
Elena Fortún and Matilde Ras. Seville: Renacimiento, 2022. 7–62.
Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. “Introducción.” Oculto sendero. Author Elena Fortún. 
Seville: Renacimiento, 2016. 7–68. 
Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. “Introducción.” Celia madrecita. Author Elena Fortún. 
Seville: Renacimiento, 2015. 7–38.
Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. “Introducción.” El cuaderno de Celia. Author Elena Fortún. 
Seville: Renacimiento, 2017. 13–20
Capdevila-Argüelles, Nuria. “The Dissidence Inside Her Closet: Elena Fortún versus 
Encarnación Aragoneses Urquijo.” Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature: 
Activism, Sezuality, and the Otherness of the ‘Chicas Raras’. Eds. Ana Isabel Simón 
Alegre and Lou Charnon-Deutsch. London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. 
102–17.
Carretón Cano, Vicente. “Victorina Durán y el círculo sáfico de Madrid. Semblanza 
de una escenografía del 27.” El maquinista de la generación 9 (2005): 4–20.
Consejo Superior de Mujeres de Acción Católica. Catálogo crítico de libros para niños. 
Madrid: Veritas Vincit, 1945.
Dorao, Marisol. Los mil sueños de Elena Fortún. Cádiz: Alboroque, 2001.
Elena Lindholm:     The Censorship of a Closeted Spain
149
Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture & Cultural Theory. 
New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Fortún, Elena. Celia institutriz en América. Seville: Renacimiento, 2015 [1944].
Fortún, Elena. Celia lo que dice. Seville: Renacimiento, 2020 [1929].
Fortún, Elena. Celia madrecita. Seville: Renacimiento, 2015 [1939].
Fortún, Elena. Celia se casa. Seville: Renacimiento, 2018 [1950].
Fortún, Elena. El cuaderno de Celia. Seville: Renacimiento, 2017 [1947].
Fortún, Elena. Oculto sendero. Seville: Renacimiento, 2016.
Fortún, Elena. Sabes quién soy. Cartas a Inés Field. Vol. 1. Ed. Nuria Capdevila-
Argüelles. Seville: Renacimiento, 2021.
Fortún, Elena. Mujer doliente. Cartas a Inés Field. Vol. 2. Ed. Nuria Capdevila-
Argüelles. Seville: Renacimiento, 2021.
Fortún, Elena, and Matilde Ras. El pensionado de Santa Casilda. Seville: Renacimiento, 
2022.
Foucault, Michel. Vigilar y castigar: nacimiento de la prisión. Transl. Aurelio Garzón 
del Camino. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2004.
García Padrino, Jaime. Historia crítica de la literatura infantil y juvenil en la España 
actual (1939–2015). Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2018.
Gorbea Lemmi, Eusebio de. Los mil años de Elena Fortún: Magerit. Madrid: Saturnino 
Calleja, 1922.
Leggott, Sarah. “The Female Intellectual in 1920s Madrid: Writing the Lyceum 
Club.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 
110 (2008): 95–112.
Lindholm, Elena. “Celia, Elena Fortún’s Queer New Girl.” Queer Women in Modern 
Spanish Literature: Activism, Sezuality, and the Otherness of the ‘Chicas Raras’. Eds. 
Ana Isabel Simón Alegre and Lou Charnon-Deutsch. London; New York, NY: 
Routledge, 2022. 118–32.
Martín Gaite, Carmen. “Pesquisa tardía de Elena Fortún.” Celia, lo que dice. Author 
Elena Fortún. Madrid: Alianza, 1993. 7–37.
Martínez Martín, Jesús A. “Editar en tiempos de dictadura: La política del libro y las 
condiciones del campo editorial.” Historia de la edición en España (1939–1975). 
Eds. Jesús A. Martínez Martín and Marcial Pons. Madrid: Ediciones de Historia, 
2015. 27–42.
Mascarell, Purificació. “‘Vestirme de hombre y montar a caballo’. Androginia y 
mujer moderna en la novela autobiográfica ‘Oculto Sendero,’ de Elena Fortún.” 
Clepsydra. Revista de Estudios de Género y Teoría Feminista 21 (2021): 17–33.
Moreno-Lago, Eva María. “Indicios y espacios literarios para la reconstrucción del 
círculo sáfico madrileño en las obras de Elena Fortún, Rosa Chacel y Victorina 
Durán.” Feminismo/s 37 (2021): 211–36.
Petley, Julian. Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide. Petley: Oneworld Publications, 2012.
Puchau de Lecea, Ana. “Girl, Interrupted and Continued: Rethinking the Influence of 
Elena Fortún’s Celia.” Girlhood Studies 10.3 (2017): 137–51.
Richmond, Kathleen. Women and Spanish Fascism: The Women’s Section of the Falange, 
1934–1959. London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. New York, NY: Harvester 
Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Thompson, Michael. “The Order of the Visible and the Sayable: Theatre Censorship 
in Twentieth-Century Spain.” Hispanic Research Journal 13.2 (2012): 93–110.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
150
Cenzura zaprte Španije: Primer Elene Fortún 
(1886–1952)
Ključne besede: španska književnost / španske pisateljice / Fortún, Elena / spolna 
identiteta / lezbištvo / frankizem / cenzura
Članek se osredotoča na to, kako sta samocenzura in državna cenzura obli-
kovali literarno zapuščino španske avtorice otroških knjig Elene Fortún. Klo-
zet je predstavljen kot ključni koncept za razumevanje vpliva cenzure na delo 
lezbične pisateljice, kot je Elena Fortún, ki je skoraj stoletje prispevala k raz-
ličnim pripovedim o španski ženskosti. Prva med njimi je pripoved o disi-
dentstvu spolov v času druge republike (1931–1939); sledi pripoved o ženi in 
materi, ki pripada Francovemu režimu (1939–1975), in nazadnje pripoved o 
vključevanju LGBTQ v Španiji v novem tisočletju (2005–2022). Dela, vklju-
čena v analizo, so raznovrstna, saj segajo od avtoričinih otroških knjig do njene 
korespondence in dveh posthumno objavljenih romanov. Branje besedil Elene 
Fortún razkriva, kako cenzura deluje kot nadzorni pogled, ki ne deluje le od 
zunaj, temveč je tudi ponotranjen v posamezniku in ohranja vrata klozeta 
zaprta od znotraj.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.134.2.'09Fortún E.:305-055.2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i1.08