Acknowledgments

As I was writing Woman in Battle Dress I received help from many people. Here I would like to name those who contributed most, both to the final editing of the manuscript as well as to the work’s promotion. First, with much love and admiration, I thank my wife, Hilda Otaño Benítez, who suggested changes of crucial importance to both the structure of various passages, as well as to the characterization of the protagonists. Without her participation, my novel would have been less consistent. Doris Summer, Judith Thorn, and Cristina Court, as friends, women, and writers with a critical eye, read parts of the manuscript and made valuable suggestions that I nearly always accepted. César Alegre listened patiently as I argued with myself over the content of each chapter, offering his observations over the space of many months. I should also thank my colleague James Maraniss, who translated the manuscript into English with great originality and dedication¹; to Ilán Stavans and Jesús Díaz, who solicited chapters for Hopscotch and Encuentro, the publications they direct, respectively; to Roberto González-Echevarría, Julio Ortega, Caryl Phillips, and Iván de la Nuez, for having helped gain visibility for the project; to Robert Rosbottom, Beatriz Peña, and the staff at the Robert Frost Library of Amherst College, for the bibliographic information with which they provided me; to Katharina von Schütz and Leandro Soto, who furnished materials and ideas for the graphic design; to Roberta Helinski, who copied and mailed off the manuscript. My most sincere gratitude goes out to all of them.

1 James Maraniss published two translated excerpts from the novel: “Woman in Battle Dress: Henriette Faber on Board the Schooner Collector” (Hopscotch: A Cultural Review: Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001); and “Excerpts from Woman in Battle Dress” (Mandorla: Issue 12, 2009, pp. 192–216). His translation of the complete novel has not been published.—JP