Fortunata and Jacinta
SynopsisPlot
Galdoz's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in the 1870s.
Story
About this book
Fortunata and Jacinta is a four-part novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, published in 1886-1887. Set in Madrid during the 1870s, it follows two women whose lives become entangled through shared emotional ties and sharp differences in social standing. Fortunata belongs to the working poor of the city, while Jacinta occupies the comfortable world of the commercial bourgeoisie. The men who connect them, including husbands and lovers, move between these worlds with varying degrees of loyalty and self-interest.
Galdós builds the story around the dense network of family alliances, business relationships, and neighborhood bonds that shaped daily life in Madrid. The novel maps the city in close detail, from its markets and tenements to its prosperous households, grounding the personal conflicts of its characters in specific streets and social circles. Class is not treated as a backdrop but as a force that determines what each character can want, say, or become.
Galdós wrote nearly eighty novels over his career, and Fortunata and Jacinta is widely regarded as his central achievement. The book's scope and psychological attention place it among the major works of nineteenth-century European realism, alongside novels by Tolstoy and Zola that similarly turned urban societies into extended fictional worlds.
