by Benito Perez Galdos

Born in Las Palmas on Grand Canary Island, Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) left his home in 1862 to study law in Madrid. Once there, he abandoned the university in short order, preferring instead to study Spain’s people and national life in its capital city and becoming active in the daily and periodical press. In this environment, Galdos experienced firsthand the increasingly authoritarian government of the Bourbon Queen Isabella II (1830-1904), including the closure of a newspaper for which he worked as a reporter. The action of Fortunata and Jacinta recreates the Madrid of Galdos’s early years there as student and then writer. It coincides also with the revolutionary period that culminated in the queen’s expulsion from Spain in 1868, and records the failure to consolidate a post-Bourbon government in...