The interwar lovestory between Celia and Aurora (#Aurelia) from the Spanish series Six Sisters (Seis Hermanas) is a painting within a painting.

This is the love story between two women from different social classes during the 1913-1916 Spain, when the women had no right to vote, they just have to marry and bear children and take care of their husbands. Celia (played by Candela Serrat) is one of the six daughters of the Silva family, a very respected family in Madrid during those times, who happens to love women and she falls in love with her best friend Petra, but Petra is straight and instead of helping Celia she tells everybody, including Celia’s sisters, that Celia is sick and needs psychiatric treatment.

Celia has to go through a terrible treatment to be “healed” of unproper feelings towards women. At the psychiatrist’s she meets a very friendly nurse, Aurora Alarcon, who helps her through the treatment and even gives her the solution to get out of it: a presumed boyfriend who can tell the doctor that Celia is cured and their relationship is real.

With Aurora’s help, Celia escapes the horrid mistreatment of electric shocks and gets real close to Aurora (played by Luz Valdenebro) who will show her what love can really be and how wonderful it is to be in love and be loved. Aurora confesses she has been through the same treatment because she also loves women and she chose her career of being a nurse to help all the women like her.

She will also introduce Celia in the suffragist movement that fought for women’s rights to vote and to have the right to inheritance of their own, because for now they will have the right for their father’s inheritance only after they marry and the fortune will go to their husband.

The main painting represents the story of the Silva sisters set in the interwar period in Madrid 1913-1916 :

Adela (Celia Freijeiro), the older sister, the fundamental pillar of the Silva sisters, is one of the most elegant and admired women of the high society of the moment; takes most decisions, is correct, generous, loving and kind; Very young widow, believes that love will never touch her door again; Blanca (Mariona Tena), is beautiful, classy, kind, elegant and educated, engaged to the rich banker Rodolfo Loygorri (Fernando Andina), minister of foreign affairs, but in love with her brother-in-law, doctor Cristóbal Loygorri; Diana (Marta Larralde), of strong character, replaces her father at the head of the factory of the Silva family, is the entrepreneurial sister, believes that she underestimates the woman and, although she does not count on finding the love of her life, her Destiny has different plans for her; Francisca (María Castro), sings in secret in the Ambigú but her dream is to sing for a more select audience; Celia (Candela Serrat), loves letters, studied teaching and her dream is to continue studying, writing and knowing the world. Later she discovers that she feels a feeling of love towards her worker friend Petra; and Elisa (Carla Díaz), is the small sister, spoiled, irascible and immature, dreams of finding a man of good position with whom he can start a family.

The six sisters go from being high class women without any concern to direct the textile factory and business of his father, Mr. Fernando Silva, after the sudden death of this, in a society in which women have neither right to vote, dependent on their uncle, because they were denied the right of inheritance or holding the right on any property.

Celia Silva is a school teacher with the dream that one day she will be a writer with the same right as men to vote and to be free, and to love Aurora freely. Their love is real, passionate, based on two intelligent and highly educated women of those times. Aurora works at private practices or at hospitals and earns her own wage, yet far smaller than a man would do.

For now, Celia is a school teacher and Aurora is a nurse, their love is hidden, but real, yet Aurora has much more experience and realizes that Celia can still have certain feelings for her first love, Petra and somehow their hidden love, fulfilled by desire, has an abrupt stop now, when Aurora needs to go back home at a small town near Madrid called Caceres and marry a man to help her family. Celia is devastated yet she continues to fight for women’s rights and poor children’s rights to learn the same things as the rich ones. Somehow she backsides Aurora and now she finds herself abandoned by her one and truly love.

After hard times she had to live back home at Caceres to live with a husband she doesn’t love, her mind being set back to Celia, Aurora leaves her husband and returns to Madrid into Celia’s arms, her one and truly love. Yet, Aurora bears her husband’s child and her escape won’t go unnoticed, and her husband persuades her wherever she will go.

Aurora and Celia leave Madrid for a small town near Madrid (Araganzuela) where Celia teaches at school and Aurora keeps searching for work at local private practices. This is the best period for the two women, although they have a hard life and hard times, living in a small one bedroom home and being persuaded by many bad intended people : Celia’s brother in law, Celia’s Marina…. And Aurora’s husband. Aurora is being accused by a patient’s husband that she deliberately killed her, while the patient died of an undiagnosed diabethes. Aurora gets hit in the head by someone unknown and after some time her bay will be stillborn. There are many tragedies, so many that it is hard to even imagine to have lived like that and get through so many tragedies. I remember the moment, when Aurora’s husband Clemente finds out about Celia and Aurora’s lesbian relationship and when he threatens them with a gun and takes Aurora away.

Celia writes articles in the local newspaper, but then someone else seems to write them for her and trashes her name Silva into mud for disgracing men or the story of their neighbors, which end to be read by Aurora’s brother and husband, and they end up finding them and they need to fled again.

I loved the moment when Aurora proposes Celia to be her wife and they end up going to war.

Unfortunately, the love story between Celia and Aurora has a bad ending, because Aurora will die of cholera and leaves an disconsolate Celia alone and unloved with a huge hole in her heart.

During the next episodes Celia will find another woman to love, Cata, but it will never compare to Aurora’s love, everything else pales in comparison. Why was their story cut this way???

The abrupt end of Celia and Aurora’s love story have brought many questions in the fans community : why their love was such a tragedy all over ? why did Aurora had to die that way? Why couldn’t it there be a happy end of a lesbian love in Spanish TV?

The tragic end of Celia and Aurora’s love story : Aurora dies of cholera during the war looks so much like the death of Cristina from the love story between Cristina and Isabel from Tierra de lobos.

Why can’t we see in Spanish TV an not alone Spanish Tv, but TV in general, lesbian stories with happy endings!!!!!???

The interwar lesbian lovestory of Aurora and Celia has substance and essence. but it lacks continuity and realism. Tragedy and concessions from their parts can be understood, they have to give up so much and so many in the name of their love and suffer so much more for their love and in the end …there is only death and remembrance. It’s unfair.

Sources :

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seis_hermanas

https://lesbicanarias.es/2016/05/09/celia-aurora-resumen-41-seis-hermanas/

http://www.lesbian-interest.eu/seis-hermanas-celia-aurora/