Benito Pérez Galdós
Benito
Pérez Galdós, (b. May 10, 1843, Las
Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain—d. Jan. 4,
1920, Madrid), writer who was regarded
as the greatest Spanish novelist since
Miguel de Cervantes. His enormous output
of short novels chronicling the history
and society of 19th-century Spain earned
him comparison with Honoré de Balzac and
Charles Dickens.
Born
into a middle-class family, Pérez Galdós
went to Madrid in 1862 to study law but
soon abandoned his studies and took up
journalism. After the success of his
first novel, La fontana de oro (1870;
“The Fountain of Gold”), he began a
series of novels retelling Spain’s
history from the Battle of Trafalgar
(1805) to the restoration of the
Bourbons in Spain (1874). The entire
cycle of 46 novels would come to be
known as the Episodios nacionales
(1873–1912; “National Episodes”). In
these works Galdós perfected a unique
type of historical fiction that was
based on meticulous research using
memoirs, old newspaper articles, and
eyewitness accounts. The resulting
novels are vivid, realistic, and
accurate accounts of historical events
as they must have appeared to those
participating in them. The Napoleonic
occupation of Spain and the struggles
between liberals and absolutists
preceding the death of Ferdinand VII in
1833 are respectively treated in the
first two series of 10 novels each, all
composed in the 1870s.
In the
1880s and ’90s Pérez Galdós wrote a long
series of novels dealing with
contemporary Spain, beginning with Doña
Perfecta (1876). Known as the Novelas
españolas contemporáneas (“Contemporary
Spanish Novels”), these books were
written at the height of the author’s
literary maturity and include some of
his finest works, notably La desheredada
(1881; The Disinherited Lady) and his
masterpiece, the four-volume novel
Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87), a study
of two unhappily married women from
different social classes. Pérez Galdós’
earlier novels in the series show a
reforming liberal zeal and an
intransigent opposition to Spain’s
ubiquitous and powerful clergy, but
after the 1880s he displayed a newly
tolerant acceptance of Spain’s
idiosyncracies and a greater sympathy
for his country. He demonstrated a
phenomenal knowledge of Madrid, of which
he showed himself the supreme
chronicler. He also displayed a deep
understanding of madness and abnormal
psychological states. Pérez Galdós
gradually came to admit more elements of
spirituality into his work, eventually
accepting them as an integral part of
reality, as evident in the important
late novels Nazarín (1895) and
Misericordia (1897; Compassion).
Financial difficulties prompted Pérez
Galdós in 1898 to begin a third series
of novels (covering the Carlist wars of
the 1830s) in the Episodios nacionales,
and he eventually went on to write a
fourth series (covering the period from
1845 to 1868) and begin a fifth, so that
by 1912 he had brought his history of
Spain down to 1877 and retold events of
which he himself had been a witness. The
books of the fifth series, however, and
his last works showed a decline in
mental powers compounded by the
blindness that overtook him in 1912.
Pérez
Galdós also wrote plays, some of which
were immensely popular, but their
success was largely owing to the
political views presented in them rather
than to their artistic value.
