Carmen Martín Gaite

The novelist Carmen Martín Gaite, who has died aged 74, was one of the generation that had to make their way in the dismal Spain of the post-civil war years, a country particularly hostile to independent women. In doing so, she helped change the face of Spanish literature and lay the basis for the resurgence in the 1970s of a new generation of readers.

To the reforming realist generation of the 1950s, including such writers as her ex-husband Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Ignacio Aldecoa, Martín Gaite added a particular sense of psychological depth. Included in this loose group of Madrid writers were two women, Josefina Aldecoa and Ana María Matute, who became her lifelong intimate friends.

The daughter of an affluent, liberal family, Martín Gaite was born in Salamanca, and graduated in romance philology from Madrid University when very few women were able to do so - at her death, she was one of only two women members of the Spanish Royal Academy. She became known for her short novel, the nightmarish El balneario (The Spa), in 1954, and won the Nadal Prize in 1957 for Entre visillos (Among Anti-macassars), in which she showed a characteristic domination of colloquial language. In both 1978 and 1994 she won the National Literature Prize, and in 1988 the Prince of Asturias Prize.

Indeed, as the young writer Belén Gopegui observed, she won every possible prize in Spanish literature except those which were fixed - in which she refused to participate. For Martín Gaite was a writer of rare principle. She was not someone to shout her opinions in a literary world full of loud voices, but discreetly showed who she was in deeds - agreeing to speak at a public library threatened by closure or refusing to lend her name to establishment institutions.

She was also a voracious reader, who never refused to help other writers. Juan José Millas, Marcos Giralt, Soledad Puértolas and Belén Gopegui are just some of the younger novelists whose careers were pushed forward by Martín Gaite's acute criticism and generosity. As well as a dozen novels, Martín Gaite wrote short stories, historical essays, literary criticism, social commentary - such as a famous 1987 book on Usos amorosos de la post-guerra española (Post-war Love Customs) - and translations.

Two novels have been published in English, Variable Cloud (1995) and The Farewell Angel (1999). The former, commonly thought the finest of her later books, added massive sales to her literary renown. Indeed, her three novels of the 1990s each sold over 300,000 copies.

Variable Cloud is the story of two childhood friends who had lost their friendship by a divergence of paths, exacerbated by sexual rivalry, but in middle-age crisis meet by chance at a party. Both are stimulated by the reunion to write down their stories, one in letters, the other in a journal. The novel is a paean to the curative effect of explaining the present by writing down the past, and not just secretly, but for another: literature as friendship. Gradually both women find solace in writing. Their troubles are not diminished, nor swept away, but held at bay by the triumphant renewal of their friendship.

Martín Gaite explores meticulously the inner lives of her protagonists, making few concessions to her readers: the themes are complex and the inner monologue abundant. Yet this long novel is very readable because of the smoothness and beauty of her style - not for nothing was she translator into Spanish of Madame Bovary - and a number of vivid secondary characters who bring wit and act as a chorus on the plights of the two women.

Martín Gaite wrote psychological novels, but always strongly pinned by a realist social context. Friendship was not just the theme of Martín Gaite's novels, but the passion, along with literature, of her life. Constantly active, unafraid to talk unguardedly, endowed with the gift of friendship, her open personality became a model for younger women of how to face life and take from it everything it has to give by herself giving generously.

And, despite early success, she was not pampered by ease and privilege: her long struggles in her career under Franco - she was already 50 when he died - were added to by the failure of her marriage and the death of her only child, her daughter Marta, in 1985. She dedicated her novel Lo raro es vivir (How Strange It Is To Live) to a friend who "always poked her head out among ruins and mistakes with her smile of light".

Martín Gaite's frank stare and open smile of light - in her art and her life - taught her readers how to understand their own ruins and mistakes. She had been working right up to her death from a cancer diagnosed only in June.

Carmen Martín Gaite, writer, born 1925; died July 23 2000

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