Doña Perfecta
Doña Perfecta opens as Pepe Rey, a confident young engineer trained in the modern, secular, scientific ideas of the city, arrives in the provincial town of Orbajosa to marry his cousin Rosario, the daughter of his aunt, the pious and revered Doña Perfecta. What begins as a warm family arrangement curdles quickly. Pepe's rationalism clashes with the town's entrenched clericalism, embodied by the scheming Canon Don Inocencio, and his aunt turns from gracious hostess into an implacable enemy. As mother and town conspire to keep the lovers apart, the conflict escalates from social slights to ruin and, finally, tragic violence.
Galdós uses this intimate family drama to stage the great nineteenth-century struggle between liberal progress and reactionary tradition, between reason and fanaticism. Orbajosa becomes a portrait of a stagnant, self-deceiving Spain where piety masks cruelty and intolerance destroys the innocent. The novel endures for its sharp characterization, biting irony, and its still-resonant warning about how righteousness can curdle into oppression.
How it begins
This edition of one of the best known of modern Spanish novels has been prepared for the use of college classes in Spanish that have already mastered the elements of Spanish grammar, but have not yet had much practice in reading. The editor has found by actual experience that it is safe to undertake the story in three or four months from the time when the study of the language is begun, that is, in the second half of the first year's work in the subject. As the book is not a long one, it should be possible to read it entire before the close of the year. Indeed, with an earnest class, even less time than this will be found to suffice. The novel is printed exactly (save correction of printer's errors) as it appears in the eighth Spanish edition (Madrid, 1896). At the same time, great pains have been taken to make the orthography and accentuation conform in all respects to the standard of the last edition of the Spanish Academy's Dictionary. The Notes are considerably fuller than is customary in college editions of modern works in foreign languages.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.