Fortunata and Jacinta

In this new and complete translation, Agnes Moncy Gullon presents the detailed realism, the diversity of character and scene that have placed Fortunata and Jacintaalongside the voluminous works of Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac. Galdos's Madrid, recast from his youthful wanderings through the city's slums and cafes, includes the egg sellers and faded bullfighters surrounding Fortunata as well as the quieter, sequestered milieu of Jacinta's upbringing. Through Juanito, the lover of both women, the writer reveals Spain as a variegated fabric of delicate traditions and established vices, of shaky politics and rich intrigue. In this vast and colorful world, resonant of Dickens's London and Balzac's France, Galdos presents his characters with a depth, ambiguity, and humor born of the multiplicity of his scene.

Galdos's novels enjoyed, for a time, a wide and attentive readership in Spain. As his reputation grew, however, hostility toward his achievements, envy of his success, and political squabbling hampered his progress, stalling his election to the Royal Academy and, in 1912, thoroughly derailing his nomination as Spain's candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Though the political controversies that surrounded Galdos's works have long been calmed, this translation by Agnes Moncy Gullon brings alive the tempestuous era in which he lived and wrote, allowing English readers to hear the percussive yet often melodic tones of nineteenth-century Madrid in the correct and casual speech of Jacinta, in the pretty but empty words of Juanito, and in the painfully proper, sometimes vulgar language of Fortunata.