House of Mist stands as one of the first South American novels written in the style that was later called magical realism. Of this story of a young bride struggling with her marriage to an aloof landowner--and the mysteries surrounding their life together--in a house deep in the lush Chilean woods, Penelope Mesic wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Bombal showed "bold disregard for simple realism in favor of a heightened reality in which the external world reflects the internal truth of the characters' feeling . . . mingling . . . fantasy, memory and event."

"One of the...