Two Portraits of the Rosas Family: Marmol and Ventura de la Vega

Abstract

In 1851 Jos6 MArmol published the first part of his famous historical novel Amalia, which pictures life in Buenos Aires under the despotism of Juan Manuel Rosas and attacks the r6gime of the dictator, who was to fall from power the following year, after the battle of Caseros. In 1853, after Rosas had fled to exile in England, another exile from Argentina, the poet and dramatist Ventura de la Vega, set out from Madrid on the only sally he was ever to make beyond the frontiers of Spain, a trip to London and Paris. Unlike Rosas, Vega was a voluntary exile, having been sent as a boy of ten to be educated in Madrid, where he settled and later married, fathered a family, and became a brilliant figure in the theatrical life of the capital. By the time he took this trip he was a member of the Spanish Academy and a well-known, though minor, playwright whose reputation had spread throughout the Hispanic world.