Fortunata y Jacinta

Juanito Santa Cruz, the only son of a wealthy cloth merchant family, is a handsome, spoiled, and idle young man, with more self-love than conscience. He agrees to marry, as his mother has arranged, his cousin Jacinta, "a girl of excellent qualities, modest, and delicate," leaving behind —at least for the moment— "the obsession with the common people" that had led him to have an affair with Fortunata, a fiery but poor girl, condemned to be "a victim of men." Fortunata puts it very clearly: "I was born of the people and I am of the people; I mean, common and wild"; but at the same time, she has a strong impulse to be "honorable" and "an angel," like Jacinta. From the antithesis —and ultimately the synthesis— between these two heroines emerges one of the pinnacles of 19th-century Spanish literature, Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-1887), by Benito Pérez Galdós, which we present here in a new edition edited by Ignacio Echevarría. The great novel of Madrid, as it has been called, meticulously explores its social strata through an extensive and memorable gallery of secondary characters, who receive almost as much attention as the protagonists. The narrator claims to know them all personally and, with his astonishing command of colloquial language, addresses the reader directly. Its realism, however, transcends mere formulas, embracing moral ambiguities, the power of dreams and the irrational, and mysterious connections between sanctity and sin, reason and unreason. Perhaps, in the end, undeniable values ​​like virtue and sanity are too often synonymous with social expediency.