1. Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). p. 31.

2. ibid.

3. Kathleen Glenn, 'Conversation With Carme Riera', Catalan Review: International Journal of Catalan Culture, 8 (1994), p. 206.

4. Luis Racionero, 'Entrevista con Carme Riera: "Cada vez tenemos menos imaginacion"', Quimera: Revista de Literatura, 9-10 (July-Aug 1981),p. 14.

5. Anne Guillaume, 'Entrevista a Carme Riera', Ventanal: Revista de Creacion y Critica, 14 (1988), p. 71.

6. This notoriously ambiguous term can mean either 'literature written in English by Irish people', or, as a social marker, 'Irish people of English descent'. It is in the former sense I use it here.

7. Glenn, op.cit., p. 208. Interview conducted in Spanish in 1990 and translated by Glenn.

8. Guillaume, op.cit., p. 75.

9. Contra l'amor en companyia i altres relats (Barcelona: Destino, 1991), p. 127. Perhaps because of a willingness to make the satire more explicit, the Castilian version replaces Coincidència with Convergencia (Contra el amor en compañía y otros relatos [Barcelona: Destino, 1991], p. 121).

10. Contra l'amor, pp. 131, 132. From this point on, page references will be incorporated in the main text

11. Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (Barcelona: Planeta, 1996), pp. 109-113. 1st ed. 1975.

12. Joc de miralls (Barcelona: Planeta, 1996), pp. 60-61. 1st ed. 1989.

13. Kathleen M. Glenn, Mirella Servodidio and Mary S. Vásquez, eds., Movable Margins: The Narrative Art of Carme Riera (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 43. Interview conducted in Spanish and translated by Glenn.

14. Plato, Symposium, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 27.

15. Jo pos per testimoni... (Barcelona: Columna, 1998), pp. 79, 87. 1st edition 1977.

16. Riera has explicitly repudiated the idea of being categorised as a professional writer. She is a professional academic who writes in her spare time, 'porque quiero contar algo, porque me gusta' (Guillaume, op.cit., p. 77).

17. 'Au lecteur', LesF leurs du mal (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 6.

18. Francesco Ardolino, 'La ficció epistolar de Carme Riera', Journal of Catalan Studies, 3 (2000) (http://www.uoc.es/jocs/3/articles/ardolino4/index.html).

19. Racionero, op.cit., p. 15.

20. Te deix, amor..., p. 56.

21. It has been pointed out that nearly all the protagonists of the stories in Contra l'amor... are, in one sense or another, writers. See Mark C. Aldrich, '"El Reportaje" de Carme Riera y "Las reglas del juego"', Hispanófila. 120 (May 1997), p. 58

22. Racionero, op.cit., pp. 14-15.

23. op.cit.

24. In the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

25. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

26. The parallel between Rafel's suicide and that of Ferrater in 1972 is suggestive, but the connections are fundamentally thematic rather than biographical. It is tempting to link the relationship between José Joaquín and Rafel with that between Ferrater and Jaime Gil de Biedma, but the issue of the writer's projection of a false persona had already been explored powerfully in Joc de miralls (1989), where there is no suggestion of a homosexual affair.