Benito Perez Galdos

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 r

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e product of a man who focused on observation and sensory perception as a means of revealing character and human meaning in all forms of existence and all human experiences. In the essay Perez Galdos makes a case for discovering this core through slow, learned study and observation based on human stimuli that prompts action, "Let us learn, with slow study, to know what is dead and what is alive in the core ours, in the Spanish core. Let us learn applying it the ear when beating of these angers that demand justice, fairness, order, means of existence. Let us apply all the sense to the observation of the stimuli that as soon as they are born turn into forces, of the desconsuelos that derive slowly towards the hope, of the gestation that acts in the sines of the art, of the industry, of science�Let us observe how the thought tries to look for the rudimentary means of the action, and how the action estimates its first gesture, its first step" (Perez Galdos 1). Perez Galdos, like many Spanish writers and realists, also found some of Spain's institutions lacking, especially when it came to taking care of the poor and needy. In fact, two of his novels chronicle the manners and mores of the bourgeoisie of Madrid as well as the under

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