pThis is the first English translation of one of the key works of 20th-century Venezuelan fiction. Published in 1949, emAna Isabel A Respectable Girl emby Antonia Palacios is a classic coming-of-age story set in Caracas in the 1920s, exploring issues of race, class, and gender and exposing the colonial and patriarchal legacy of the country in the era before urban development and the dependence on an oil economy. A modern Latin American classic and the Venezuelan counterpart of Sandra Cisneros' emThe House on Mango Street em1984, emAna Isabel A Respectable Girl embroke with the symbolic realist genre in vogue in Latin American narrative works and inaugurated a new form of expression with poetic overtones.p pemWithout patronizing or writing a manifesto, Antonia Palacios acknowledges the complexities, evokes the atmosphere and exposes the contradictions of a bygone era in Caracasem. Maria Gracia Pardo, University of Miamip pAntonia Palacios 1904-2001 was one of the most important Venezuel