María Luisa Bombal Anthes (Spanish pronunciation: [maˈɾi.a ˈlwisa βomˈβal]; Viña del Mar, 8 June 1910 – 6 May 1980) was a Chilean novelist and poet.

Upon her return to South America from Paris in 1931 she had an intense romance with a pioneer in civil aviation, Eulogio Sánchez Errázuriz (1903–1956), who did not share her interest in literature.

With the help of friends, Bombal fled the country to Argentina, where in 1933 she met Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires.

[5] Commonly, Bombal is depicted as an “ethereal and tragic woman, inclined toward the poetic and the sentimental.” [4] However, this image overlooks the clearly rational and deliberate nature of her writing.

Early studies of La última niebla highlighted its uniqueness within the Chilean literary context, where criollismo, governed by a positivist worldview, predominated.

In literary terms, María Luisa Bombal was a pioneer in daring to describe sexual acts openly, thereby transgressing the patriarchal discourse that had historically assigned women a passive and modest role.

[4] Within the patriarchal system, human sexuality has traditionally been interpreted and theorized from a male perspective, which typically proposes phallic penetration as the culminating event.

Bombal subverts this view by exploring “narcissistic experiences, crafting discourses in which erotic pleasure becomes autonomy and the discovery of one’s own body.” Thus, the female body becomes a site of self-exploration, a “place of sensations” free from the constructions imposed by patriarchal hegemony.

First and foremost, the woman’s hair is portrayed as a link to the primal, “connecting to an initial slime, destroyed by the civilizing impulse.” The “lush hair” of Bombal’s characters becomes “the last vestige of a Lost Paradise … lost to the imposition of an epistemology and practice grounded in reason as an organizing principle.”[4] “The romantic heroine is the precursor of the female characters found in the sentimental melodramas or feuilletons, whose discourse is incorporated by María Luisa Bombal in most of her texts.

Wilted flesh clinging to a narrow skeleton, a sunken belly pressed against the hips… The suicide of an almost-old woman, how disgusting and futile.” Similarly, Ana María in La amortajada reflects: “Why keep fooling herself that, for a long time, she had been forcing herself to cry?

A certain irritation and a dull resentment dried up her suffering, perverting it.”[4] “The fundamental ideogram throughout María Luisa Bombal’s entire work [...] is the deep and irrevocable split between man and woman.” In the author's narratives, these human groups are “condemned to miscommunication and trapped in social roles defined by power relations.”[4] The concept of man, not only in Bombal’s work but also in the thought of Simone de Beauvoir and the early twentieth century in general, was delineated by the principles of Activity and Doing, which formed the core of his existence.

Bombal viewed femininity as a symbol of uniqueness; more related to nature, emotions and intuition; very different from how she depicts masculinity, where men are described as stronger and wiser, at the moment of facing problems.