Dona Perfecta

Doña Perfecta (1876) is a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. Published toward the beginning of Pérez Galdós’ career, Doña Perfecta is a powerful story of romance and religion that raises timeless questions regarding the meaning of love and the restrictions placed on individual lives by the Catholic Church. Adapted several times for film and television in Spain and abroad, the novel is one of Pérez Galdós’ most beloved works of fiction. “‘What more can I tell you of Dona Rosarito but that that she is the living image of her mother? You will have a treasure, Senor Don Jose, if it is true, as I hear, that you have come to be married to her. She will be a worthy mate for you, and the young lady will have nothing to complain of, either.’” Don Jose Rey, known to friends and family as Pepe, arrives in the cathedral city of Orbajosa to marry his cousin Rosario. A young liberal, Jose has mixed feelings regarding the institution of marriage and the place of the Catholic church, but decides to obey his father’s wishes and go ahead with the marriage as it has been arranged. When a disagreement arises between Pepe’s father and Doña Perfecta, the mother of Rosario, their spite threatens to destroy the lives of the two young lovers. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta is a classic of Spanish literature reimagined for modern readers.

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) was a prolific Spanish realist novelist, who through a lack of good translations is virtually unknown outside Spain, though he has been compared as second only to Cervantes in Spanish literature and whose work is considered to give the deepest, truest, most comprehensive realities of Spain.

A novel involving a family and the conflicts between the older and younger generations.

This novel from Benito Perez Galdos is one of the towering masterpieces of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, a distinction that rests in large part on the indelible character of Dona Perfecta. As a new widow desperate to escape destitution, Dona Perfecta promised the hand of her young daughter in marriage to her nephew Pepe. But when the time comes for the wedding to be planned, Dona Perfecta has changed her mind -- and she embarks on a ruthless campaign of terror to ensure that the ceremony never takes place.

In the 1980s, Jane Collier revisited a village in Andalusia, where she and others had conducted fieldwork twenty years earlier, to investigate changes in family relationships and to explore the larger question of the development of a "modern subjectivity" among the people. Whereas the villagers she met in the sixties stressed the importance of meeting social obligations, the people she interviewed more recently emphasized the need to think for oneself: status concerns in choosing a spouse had apparently been replaced by romantic love, patriarchal authority by partnership marriages, parental demands for obedience by hopes of earning children's affection, mourners' respect for the dead by personal expressions of grief. In each of these areas, the author detected a modern concern for "producing oneself," which emerged with changes in how villagers experienced social inequality. Collier notes that when inheritance appeared to determine social status, villagers protected family reputations and properties by demonstrating concern for "what others might say." Once villagers began participating in the national job market, where individual achievement appeared to determine a worker's income, they focused on realizing their inner abilities and productive capacities. Sensitivity to one's feelings, thoughts, and aptitudes, along with "rational" assessments of the costs and benefits entailed in "choosing" how to use them, testified to a person's unceasing efforts to realize inner potentials. The author also traces shifts in the meaning of "tradition," suggesting that although "modern" people cannot "be" traditional, they must have traditions in order to produce themselves.