Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women

Don Benito Perez Galdos is the most important novelist of the Spanish language, right after Cervantes.This is his masterpiece. Galdos has many great works, but this one has all the ingredients that you may find in his other smaller works. It is a huge work, the size of "War and Peace" or "Middlemarch", but it reads like a short story. I remember reading it during my college time, and not being able to put the book down, getting late too often to appointments, or just daydreaming trying to picture the streets of Madrid in the 19th century, the faces of the two leading ladies...Absolutly wonderful. A must read for anyone interested in high quality literature of any language. If you speak Spanish and you still haven't read "Fortunata y Jacinta" this must be your top priority.You will not regret it.

Until I picked up a copy of Fortunata and Jacinta on a whim from a bookseller in Burgos, I had never heard of Benito Pérez Galdós: Why this novel isn't better-known in America is completely beyond me. Pérez Galdós is sometimes compared to Dickens, but the comparison is misleading: for delicious ambiguity, unsettlingly realistic psychology, and unforgettable, sympathetic characters far more engaging than vulgar, oversimplified Dickensian puppets, Pérez Galdós is far superior. The narrative sparkles with humor and wit while never compromising the tragic beauties that make the book so powerful. It's no exaggeration to say that this book should be required reading for anyone interested in culture - a classic not only of Spanish, but of Western Literature.

Having read this novel both in Spanish and in translation, I can truly say that it's a masterpiece. The characters are realistically drawn, the plot is engaging, and most inportantly, we can see the inner feelings and motivations behind the main characters' actions. This book can be analyzed on so many levels: psychological, historical, from a feminist perspective...it's a gold-mine for Galdos scholars. But it shouldn't be limited to Spanish literature scholars; English majors should read it in their world lit classes to compare with Dickens.

An unexpected delight, author Perez Galdos is the Iberian Dickens, with dozens of full length novels, many in an intricate historical series. Fortunata y Jacinta is perhaps his best known work, a sharply drawn social portrait of mid-Victorian era Madrid. The lower class and the bourgeoisie are each represented by one female protagonist, with penetrating looks at the clergy, government, and business establishments as backdrops