Suffering Women

Successive literary histories have immortalized the categorization of Galdós’s early narrative fiction as “thesis novels,” engaged in exhaustive attacks on the enemies of a progressive liberal agenda. Thus, generations of students have learned that works such as La Fontana de Oro (1871), Doña Perfecta (1876), Gloria (1877), and La familia de León Roch (1878) are all about the evils of absolutism and fanatical Catholicism. A broad consensus in Galdós mythology has held that these protest novels, while interesting, are the one-dimensional products of a young writer: only when we reach the 1880s, some have argued, does Galdós reach his full