In/Conclusion

Abstract

After writing and editing the preceding pages, I feel that I am now on a first-name basis with these writers. I will ask my English-speaking audience, then, to allow me to express my feeling of closeness (cercanía) by granting me the stylistic license to transgress academic practice. If my readers have read through this entire book, they will have understood (and, I hope, accepted) the reason for the shifting tones in my writing; the reason why I have felt a need to combine the personal and the academic registers in order to read these women writers from the double perspectiv e—intellectual and emotional—that makes them form part of my work and my life.