Fortunata and Jacinta

Galdós turned nineteenth-century bourgeois Madrid into a world as dense and populated as any great city of European realism. Fortunata and Jacinta is long, yes, but that length is part of the argument: life does not summarize either. The portrait of the two types of woman that the society of the time manufactured — the legitimate wife and the mistress — remains uncomfortable because we still recognize the mechanisms. The best of Galdós and one of the finest portraits of society in our literature.