This article takes as its starting point representations of women and the family, and discussions of love by surrealist and avant-garde practitioners from Spain and France published mainly in literary reviews from the 1920s and 1930s. Given the male heterosexual bias of the surrealist and avant-garde groups in Spain and France, it is perhaps unsurprising that a majority of their discussions of love necessarily invoke representations of women. In the first section of this article, I examine some of these male-authored representations of women, juxtaposing them with female-authored contributions to the debate on women. I aim to demonstrate that the heterogeneous spaces of the reviews facilitated a plurality of representations of women which is, perhaps, more difficult to locate elsewhere in other media. 1 In the second section of the article I focus on representations of the family in order to consider the problematic relationship between surrealist and avant-garde writers and the domestic unit. The family and its home as primary locus of domesticity recur in texts from this period despite being repeatedly condemned by authors on both sides of the Pyrenees. I compare the extent to which these writers sought to do away with the domestic space with the extent to which they were fascinated by its possible recuperation in a new discourse on love.The heterogeneity of the review space is neatly exemplified in the French surrealist literary periodical, La Révolution surréaliste, published between 1924 and 1929, through the varied portrayals of women printed on its pages. Conservative and misogynistic representations of women sit alongside images of women that appear to offer more optimistic possibilities both for the woman reader and practitioner. In issue eleven of La Révolution surréaliste, in 'Recherches sur la sexualité' (1928), André Breton, head of the Parisian surrealist group, Pierre Unik, fellow review contributor, and other members of the group argue whether it is necessary to consult a woman on her sexual preferences prior to
