It investigates the internal intensities and crises of self that can occur under such restrictions. It captures both the domestic boredom of young women in the Argentina of Lange’s youth, and the tragically limited options available to older ones. Events repeat and deviate, fact and fiction mingle. A teenage girl watches three nameless, unmarried women in the house opposite hers. People in the Room, her penultimate novel, is an obsessive, claustrophobic book. Both received mixed reviews due to their “indecent” subject matter, and Lange would later disown them – but they are early examples of, what KM Sibbald calls, “her vanguard feminism”. The second was about a lone woman travelling on a ship with 30 sailors from Buenos Aires to Oslo. The first was about an adulterous love triangle, thought to be based on her own experiences with Borges and the poet Oliverio Girondo, whom she later married. Following several books of poetry, she published two semi-autobiographical novels. In her native Argentina, only a few of her 11 books remain in print, and only now – 68 years after its original release – is the first translation of one of her novels, People in the Room, being published in English.īorn in 1905 in Buenos Aires, Lange was already collaborating with major writers in her late teens, as her mother hosted literary tertulias at their family home on Calle Tronador.
Yet Lange’s image as a muse, as a footnote to her male contemporaries, persists. So why is she not remembered? In 1959, Lange was awarded Argentina’s highest literary prize, the Gran Premio de Honor of the Argentine Writers’ Association – the same award Borges won in 1944.
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