In writing about women's popular romance novels from the early years of Franco's rule, I have sought to vindicate the reading of works until now disregarded on account of their ideological complicity with the prevailing sociopolitical order and their alleged narrative transparency. While these assumptions are not all together unfounded, their application as ready-made interpretations has rendered the study of the selected texts futile, or at the very best, redundant. In an effort to debunk this a priori judgmentalism, I take the novels’ normative function (the endorsement and diffusion of desired feminine models of comportment), and their socio-political conditions of emergence, as my point of departure.

As we have seen, the post-war authors of novelas rosa were heavily influenced by the national-Catholic signifying and representational system, especially since it was during this time of political and cultural upheaval, brought about by the Nationalist victory in 1939, that many of the values, conventions, and cultural codes that inform narratives from the early 1940s were instilled as an expedient way of legitimating and consolidating the new order. The comprehensive analysis of Catholic, bourgeois, and Falangist feminine ideals found in the first part of this study establishes the groundwork necessary to understanding the prescribed models of female socialization and the prevailing conventions of representing women in the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War. Susan Suleiman's readings of the ideological novel in terms of positive and negative apprenticeships and Carmen Martín Gaite's writings on the role of post-war romance novels in forging the subjectivity of their contemporary female readers provide tools for examining the relationship between “cultural production and social power” (Sieburth 8)—between selected women-authored texts and the constraints that shape them.

Given the complex matrix of post-war Spain, the national-Catholic agenda, and the ubiquitous gender and genre expectations, an examination of four novels from the early 1940s by bestselling Spanish authors of novelas rosa—Luisa-María Linares, Concha Linares-Becerra, Carmen de Icaza, and María Mercedes Ortoll—offers a model for reading post-war female representations in terms of exemplarity.