Yolando Oreamuno Unger was a Costa Rican writer, who was born on April 8, 1916 in San José, Costa Rica and died in México City on July 8, 1956, aged forty. Her most renowned novel is La Ruta de su Evasión (1948).

Early life

Yolanda Oreamuno lost her mother during her childhood and was raised by her grandmother, Eudoxia Salazar Salazar viuda de Unger, her father and her aunts. She attended the Colegio de Señoritas (a female-only secondary institution). Later, she studied bookkeeping and worked for a while at the Costa Rican Post Office headquarters.

Personal life and marriages

She married the Chilean diplomat Jorge Molina Wood. After her husband's death she returned to Costa Rica and was married to Oscar Barahona Streber. They had a son together in 1942, Sergio Barahona Oreamuno. They divorced and Barahona Streber migrated to Guatemala. In 1949, Yolanda Oreamuno fell seriously ill and spent four months in a hospital in Washington. She later moved to Mexico D.F. She died in Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio's house in 1956. In 1961 her remains were moved to the General Cemetery in San Jose La libertad de la mujer, "motor vital" de la nueva novela de Sergio Ramírez in a pit with no other identification that the number 729 Tumba de la escritora Yolanda Oeramuno.In July 2011, her tomb was renovated. A plate and a photo now mark the place Yolanda Oreamuno se completa. This reflects, perhaps, the growing recognition of her literary work and the awareness of the difficulties that she experienced living in the conservative and close patriarchal society that Costa Rica was at the time.

Literary work

Her most renowned novel is La Ruta de su Evasión (1948). Oreamuno draws on narrative techniques that were uncommon in other Costa Rican writers. It is believed that authors like Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

 and Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

influenced her literary creation. Costa Rican critic Abelardo Bonilla wrote that "In this as in all works of Yolanda Oreamuno there is boldness of conception and form, but there is a lack of internal unity" (Bonilla, Abelardo. (1971). Historia de la literatura costarricense, Editorial STVDIUM, San José, San José, Costa Rica : pp. 329).

In 1961, the Editorial Costa Rica published a volume entitled "A lo largo del corto camino" containing essays, reviews, short stories and four chapters of the novel La Ruta de su Evasión.