The novel was best known in the English-speaking world for its fierce attack on the Catholic Church. It was abridged (from 61 chapters to 31) and translated into English as Birds Without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru by J. G. H, published in 1904 by London publisher Charles J. Thynne, a publisher specializing in Adventist religious tracts (the translation carries advertisements for the works of Brownlow North), and printed in Aberdeen, with a preface by Rev. Andrew A. Milne, the American Bible Society's agent in La Plata between 1862 and 1907 and head of operations in South America. Milne draws analogies between «Mrs Turner» and Beecher Stowe, but whereas the latter had the faith of a «great Christian nation behind her», Matto worked valiantly alone and her novel was «under the ban of the Roman Catholic Church» (Birds, [1904], viii). J. G. H. or Miss Hudson, described in Matto's Viaje de recreo as «inteligente escritora educacionalista» (109 [publication details in note 23]), dedicated her translation to the memory of her «loyal friend and staunch defender of the oppressed and downtrodden» Albert Merriam Hudson (1843-1893), the younger brother of the William H. Hudson (whose Anglo/US-Argentine family were Methodists) and whose book Green Mansions was also published by Charles J. Thynne in 1904. Albert, born in Quilmes, Argentina, was a teacher and died when he was fifty. I have consulted the first, illustrated, edition of Birds Without a Nest held in the British Library.

«Situado a unos 120 kilómetros de Cuzco, y con una escasa población de 1359 habitantes» (Alberto Tauro, Clorinda Matto de Turner y la novela indígena [Lima: Univ. Nacional Mayor de San Marcos Lima, 1976], 10).

Viaje de recreo. España, Francia, Inglaterra, Italia, Suiza, Alemania (Valencia: Sempere, 1909). Francisco Sempere also published the second and third editions of Aves sin nido (1906, 1909) on the recommendation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (Viaje, 31).

Ibid., 142.

Ibid., 135.

All indications confirm Matto's conversion, albeit in her own mind, from Catholicism to Protestantism, especially considering her collaboration with the America Bible Society (see above) for whom she translated the Gospels to Quechua. The first volume, Traducción al quechua del Evangelio de San Lucas y los Hechos de los Apóstoles, was published in Buenos Aires 1901 (no publisher cited).

Viaje, 135.

This aspect of the plot, whereby in order to progress the mestiza girl has to renege on her Indian roots, has been much criticized, especially by Antonio Cornejo Polar who refers to it as the «occidentalización del indio, a través de la educación» (Literatura y sociedad en el Perú: la novela indigenista [Lima: Lasontay, 1980], 42).

Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin nido (Lima: Editorial Mantaro, 1995), 230.

Birds Without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, trans. J. G. H., emended by Naomi Lindstrom (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996), xviii; xxi. Lindstrom quotes John Brushwood, Genteel Barbarism: New Readings of Nineteenth-century Spanish American Novels (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1981), 144. Brushwood adds that the derailment «destroys the illusion of convenience» (146).