Sentimental Doubts

Sentimental Doubts, here translated into English for the first time by Jessica Sequeira, was iconic Chilean writer ­Teresa Wilms Montt’s first book. It was originally published in 1917, in Buenos Aires, after the author had left an entire life behind her in Santiago: her husband, her parents, the convent where she’d been confined for supposedly committing adultery, and her two daughters, whom she was forbidden from seeing. In this work, she communicates her "inquietudes": the racing heart, the muttering mind, the explosion of doubts. Wilms Montt subverts the religious charge of doubt to turn pain into eroticism, sadness into seduction, doubt into assertion, and there is a great beauty to be found in this restlessness and impressionistic shifting, these temporary ­glimmers of light on water.