In this brief article, David Herzberger begins by describing how, with the help of Juan Benet as her interlocutor in 1966, renowned Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite found her historiographic voice. Herzberger goes on to examine how this relates to Martín Gaite's legacy in historiography and her understanding of the Franco regime and the Spanish Civil War. He explains that along with Benet, Martín Gaite was one of the most important novelists to challenge the Francoist understanding of history, which had laid out the Civil War as a crusade, as a single plot, shaped by the rhetoric of the "Reconquista." She argued in many of her essays, and showed in her fiction as well, that stories awaken the past to indeterminate and diverse meanings rather than to fixed ones. This view then allowed her to explore the idea of how the past might be used in the present. Herzberger concludes that Martín Gaite expressed her views at a time when academic historians were reluctant to challenge the dominant historiography of how to define the past in general, and how to define the Regime and the War in particular. Her challenge to Spanish historiography stands as her accomplishment and her legacy.