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FAMILY & GENDER STUDIES For Glory and Bolívar: The Remarkable Life of Manuela Sáenz. By Pamela S. Murray. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 222. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.
This long-awaited book from Pamela Murray traces the life of Manuela Sáenz, the lover and confidante of Simón Bolívar. Many historians have found this mercurial woman of little interest apart from her relationship with Bolívar. By contrast, Murray devotes half the book to Saenz's life in the 26 years after Bolivar's death in 1830. She argues that Manuela occupied a space between the public life of politics and the private one of domesticity in the chaotic independence period.
Would Manuela Sáenz have risen to historical prominence without her association with Bolivar? Perhaps not, but her life was far from ordinary. Accident of birth gave her a tenuous elite status without embedding her in a watchful family. An illegitimate child born of a Spanish father and creole mother in 1797, she was raised in a convent in Quito. Her...