Benito Perez Galdos was an extremely prolific writer. He was a Spanish novelist and dramatist who lived and wrote during the later half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. He is compared to Balzac and he is considered an enlightened progressive, one who attempted to portray all facets of human experience in his works, “His work, like the realists, evokes by its very nature, an interdisciplinary response; knowledge of the novels and knowledge of their age remains inseparable. Yet the very scale of his literary output has in some ways worked against this: 31 novels, 46 Episodias Nacionales, 23 plays, and the equivalent of twenty volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings” (An Introduction 1). In Episodios Nacionales he wrote forty-six novels which chronicle the history of Spain, from the battle of Trafalgar to 1875 when the monarchy was restored. The novels are very well documented and considered to be an authentic reproduction of a past era. Perez Galdos also wrote novels that contained his ideology or worldviews, among them Dona Perfecta, Gloria, and La Familia de Leon Roch. In these novels the author expresses liberal, somewhat anticlerical themes. In Dona Perfecta, he explores religious bigotry. In Gloria, we get a tale of a Roman Catholic girl who cannot marry the man she loves because he is Jewish. Likewise, in La Familia de Leon Roch, we once again are treated to a story in which religion creates difficulties. In this story we see the breakdown of a married coupled who cannot reconcile their religious differences.
Perez Galdos wrote what are considered his finest works in the collection of novels known as Novelas Espanolas Contemporaneas, in which he covers different aspects of society, from the Madrid bourgeoisie to the beggars and paupers of Madrid’s underworld. In the trilogy entitled Nazarin, Holma, and Angel Guerra, the author provides his views on modern mysticism. P...