Translator's Introduction Concha Castroviejo (1910-95), Spanish journalist, critic, novelist, and short story writer, was born in Santiago de Compostela (northwestern Spain) and died in Madrid after having lived a full life on two continents. Upon completion of her secondary studies, she enrolled in the Humanities program of the University of Santiago de Compostela and took a degree in philosophy and letters (Filosofia y letras). Fluent in French, a language she had begun to study in elementary school, she also attended the University of Bordeaux, a city in which she resided for long periods. After the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) Castroviejo and her husband Joaquin Seijo Alonso fled their homeland and went into exile in Mexico. At first they lived in Campeche, on the Yucatan Peninsula, where both taught at the university. two eventually relocated to Mexico City, where they resided until the end of the 1940s, and it was there that their only daughter Maria Antonia was born. When Castroviejo returned to Spain in 1950, she obtained a degree in journalism and went on to write for well-known newspapers like Informaciones and La hoja del lunes. While pursuing a career as a newspaperwoman, she also began to publish articles of literary criticism and pieces of short fiction in La Estafeta Literaria, Insula, Blanco y Negro, and Q.P. In long fiction Concha Castroviejo published two novels: Those Who Went Away (Los que se fueron, 1957) about Spanish Civil War expatriates-a widow and her son-who go first to Paris and afterwards to Mexico, where the mother sees that her son's future lies in this new country, not Spain; and Eve of Hate (Vispera del odio, 1959), which received the Elisenda de Moncada Prize, about a woman who has an illegitimate child and grows to hate her husband for his cruelty and greed, again with the Spanish Civil War as background. (It was translated into French in 1965.) In short fiction Castroviejo published two books of children's stones: Garden with Seven Gates (El jardin de las siete puertas, 1961), which received the Doncel Prize (and was translated into Slovak in 1973); and Linas Days (Los dias de Lina, 1971), written with grant support from the Juan March Foundation. Every reader of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimms knows, to state the obvious, that fairy tales are not for children alone, inasmuch as they speak to fantasies and fears that are our constant companions in life. stones that make up Garden with Seven Gates will, I believe, be viewed in the same light-although peopled with children protagonists, they are not for children alone. It is a collection of stones that can be variously classified as lyrical and enchanting and of stones that can be variously classified as morality, cautionary, and fairy tales. In this last category The Weaver of Dreams (La tejedora de suenos) stands out. Replete with a lone little girl who ventures deep into a forest, a multicolored house (with seven chimneys that issue smoke in seven different colors), cuckoos and swifts that carry commissions in their bills, a bear that supplies firewood, rabbits that bring vegetables-in a word, the stuff of enchantment-Castroviejo's tale takes Rogelia, the child protagonist, on a journey of discovery. Ridiculed at home and at school, Rogelia dares to dream but finds no outlet for her fantasies until she meets the old woman who is a weaver of dreams. Her discovery is that she is not useless, that she can create beauty, that she can console the sick, that, in fine, she has found her niche in life, i.e., the best realization of the best dream. Another look at The Weaver of Dreams examines the story from the feminist perspective of a Spanish woman who can speak to the life of a Spanish girl. I refer to the arresting interpretation of Carolina Fernandez Rodriguez, who has kindly given me permission to reproduce it here in its entirety: Women's inferior condition in a patriarchal regime is another topic that can be occasionally glimpsed in the collection (The Garden with Seven Gates), in The Weaver of Dreams, for example, one can see the kind of traditional upbringing that a Spanish girl was expected to have in the 1960s. …