intellectuals of the Second Spanish Republic, she met Juan José Domenchina, poet and personal secretary of Manuel Azaña, whom she married on 6 November 1936. The Civil War and exile Shortly before the civil war broke out, Champourcín published what would be her only novel: La casa de enfrente (after this she only wrote excerpts for the unfinished novel Mientras allí se muere, in which she narrates her experiences in her work as a nurse during the civil war). The novel was eclipsed by political events that took place after the beginning of the civil war. However, this work represents an important milestone in the literature written by women, as the author uses a narrator-protagonist to provide a fine analysis of the upbringing, education and socialization of bourgeois girls in the first decades of the 20th century. This work allows us to consider Ernestina de Champourcín as a moderately feminist author. During the Spanish Civil War, Juan Ramón and his wife, Zenobia Camprubí, concerned about orphaned or abandoned children, founded a kind of committee called the "Junta de Protección de Menores". Ernestina de Champourcín joined as a nurse, but due to problems with some militiamen she had to leave and enter the hospital run by Lola Azaña as a nurse's assistant. One of the consequences of her husband's work as Azaña's political secretary was that the couple had no choice but to leave Madrid, embarking on a journey that took them to Valencia, Barcelona and France, where they were in Toulouse and Paris, until, finally, 1939, they were invited to Mexico by the diplomat and writer Alfonso Reyes, who was the founder and director of the Casa de España in Mexico. This country then became the definitive site of her exile. Although at first Champourcín wrote numerous verses for magazines such as Romance and Rueca , her creative activity was reduced due to her economics needs. During this time she worked as a translator for the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica and an interpreter for the "Association of Technical Staff of International Conferences". However, her stay in Mexico was eventually to be one of her most fruitful stages, and she published Presencia a oscuras (1952), Cárcel de los sentidos (1960) and El nombre que me diste (1960) during this period. Her mentor, Juan Ramón Jiménez, worked as a cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in the United States,