A woman moves through life in a sequence that threads her First Communion, her birth into the world, and a marriage to a man who makes her feel aged by the gentlest of whispers about love, while she records in a diary the emotions she cannot fully name. She does not drift into the fantasy of a Parisian balcony like a bored and self-satisfied Emma Bovary. Another woman emerges from shadows and fear, alive when she speaks of war and recalls the moment, among the rubble of bombing, when she scanned the crowd for the husband she would marry. Raised to be clean and orderly like her mother, she is told to stay quiet at home, branded an idiot and a misfit, and reminded that she is fortunate to have him in her life. A third figure lies in the bed of a man whose charisma and leadership drew him toward political struggle, exploring love and sexual freedom in campus gatherings and imagining a different life for the women in his family and for those who would come after.
Three women share the same name, Ramona. Three generations—grandmother, mother, and daughter—reimagined as Mundeta Jover, Mundeta Ventura, and Mundeta Claret in a single city, Barcelona. Their lives unfold from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century, bound to the same heartbeat of the place. The narrative begins with the memory of the Liceu bombing of 1893 and travels through the Second Republic, the Civil War, and the early days of reclaiming freedoms and rights that had dimmed under dictatorship. Three women, three lives, and their pages tell the story of Ramona, a name that becomes a thread through time. The work is introduced as the first novel of Montserrat Roig, published in 1972 and later republished in Spanish by Consonni, with Gemma Deza Guil as translator. The characters Mundeta Jover, Mundeta Ventura, and Mundeta Claret are described as more than mother, daughter, and grandmother, more than a changed name. In the preface, Roig offers a meditation on the lives, violence, revolutions, and the full spectrum of feminine longing and aspiration present in these pages.
Farewell Ramona, welcome Montserrat Roig. She was a journalist, novelist, television presenter, occasional playwright, and a pioneering voice for feminism and historical memory. The daughter of Barcelona’s Eixample district, she captured the political ideals of those defeated in the Civil War and stood as a leftist and feminist critic. Anna Maria Moix notes that she embodied the narrative craft with vigor as she traversed the paths of life. Roig produced novels that earned acclaim, including the Sant Jordi Prize in 1977, and works such as Time of cherries, Purple Hour, and Melodious Sound, alongside short stories like Molta stolen and Youth Song. Her journalism and studies on Catalans in Nazi camps further rooted her as a chronicler of Republican survivors and memory. Yet in recent years Roig’s work has seen a softer, renewed recognition, even as many titles have fallen out of print.
everything can change
Maria MurDean of Consonni explains to this newspaper that Ramona goodbye is part of an editorial commitment to literary archaeology. This involves recovering books by authors such as Marge Piercy and James Alan McPherson, many from the 1970s that face disappearance due to shifting publishing trends and market pressures. The Roig titles find renewed life in bookstores, with Time of cherries, Purple Hour, and Melodious Sound reappearing in editions that also translate works from Basque, Catalan, and Galician. The aim is to answer questions about feminist thought that transcends both methods and content.
Roig’s voice remains a dialogue with readers about the weight of religion on women, the questions of sex, and how individuals position themselves against love and rebellion. What are these women’s relationships to the men of their era, with society, and with the idea of empowerment across historical moments? The core message endures: everything can change. Roig speaks to readers about the histories their mothers lived through, the struggle for independence, and the chances history offered women to live autonomously. Her work also reveals how lies beneath city-building and national histories moved forward, shaping perception and memory alike.
took ten years
What would Montserrat Roig be today if she had not passed away at forty-five? The author Bathsheba Garcia describes her as a remarkably original figure who faced early death with a fierce, unyielding stance against fascism and a freer approach to life that always paid off. Roig’s legacy is echoed in Garcia’s biography, which surveys her career from journalism to fiction and essays published in periodicals and anthologies spanning 1966 to 1983. Garcia notes that Roig died in November 1991 after a brief illness while she was abroad, and that during that interval, dissertations and anthologies kept echoing her voice. The sense remains that Roig was a powerful, influential force in Catalan feminist thought and literary criticism, widely recognized in the 80s and 90s even before television and media fully embraced her contributions.
Garcia explains that Roig was a sharp critic of nationalism and a clear proponent of class struggle. Her work interrogates the experiences of Barcelona’s middle class against the backdrop of war and the Franco regime. She scrutinizes how voices are filtered through gender, presenting the perspectives of three Mundetas who still speak to readers today. It is an act of memory and perhaps a form of love for history, inviting audiences to listen closely to what women endured and how they reframed their world.