Reading Giles Tremlett’s España: A Brief History of Spain, I pricked up my ears when he declared that Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta was ‘rated by some as second only to Don Quixote in the Spanish canon’. I knew neither the novel nor the author, but I discovered that it had indeed come late to the English-speaking world, the first translation appearing a century after its original publication in Spanish in 1884–5.
‘La Regenta’, Ana Ozores, is the beautiful young wife of a regente or magistrate, now retired, in Vetusta, a thinly disguised portrait of the Asturian city of Oviedo, where Alas was professor of Roman law. She is coveted by two men, Fermín de Pas, the vicar-general of the diocese, and Alvaro Mesía, the local Don Juan. Fermín, her confessor, falls passionately in love with her. Alvaro considers her the most challenging in a long line of conquests. Volume One of this very long novel (it runs to nearly 700 pages in the Penguin Classics edition) introduces us to the characters in this northern provincial city and sets the scene for the dénouement in Volume Two.
Ana is the daughter of a free-thinker who belongs to one of the oldest families in Vetusta, and an Italian dressmaker who dies giving birth to her – a match which appals her father’s snobbish family. Forced into exile because of his liberal views, Ana’s father appoints a governess, a Spaniard brought up in England who is said to be a liberal Catholic. She however turns out to be a hypocrite whose ruling passion is lust. Then Ana’s father dies and she is taken in by his two spinster sisters who want to marry her off. The choice falls on Víctor Quintanar, an Aragonese judge twice her age.
Ana emerges from this unpromising background as a delicate, neurasthenic young woman, prey to romantic da
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Subscribe now or Sign inReading Giles Tremlett’s España: A Brief History of Spain, I pricked up my ears when he declared that Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta was ‘rated by some as second only to Don Quixote in the Spanish canon’. I knew neither the novel nor the author, but I discovered that it had indeed come late to the English-speaking world, the first translation appearing a century after its original publication in Spanish in 1884–5.
‘La Regenta’, Ana Ozores, is the beautiful young wife of a regente or magistrate, now retired, in Vetusta, a thinly disguised portrait of the Asturian city of Oviedo, where Alas was professor of Roman law. She is coveted by two men, Fermín de Pas, the vicar-general of the diocese, and Alvaro Mesía, the local Don Juan. Fermín, her confessor, falls passionately in love with her. Alvaro considers her the most challenging in a long line of conquests. Volume One of this very long novel (it runs to nearly 700 pages in the Penguin Classics edition) introduces us to the characters in this northern provincial city and sets the scene for the dénouement in Volume Two. Ana is the daughter of a free-thinker who belongs to one of the oldest families in Vetusta, and an Italian dressmaker who dies giving birth to her – a match which appals her father’s snobbish family. Forced into exile because of his liberal views, Ana’s father appoints a governess, a Spaniard brought up in England who is said to be a liberal Catholic. She however turns out to be a hypocrite whose ruling passion is lust. Then Ana’s father dies and she is taken in by his two spinster sisters who want to marry her off. The choice falls on Víctor Quintanar, an Aragonese judge twice her age. Ana emerges from this unpromising background as a delicate, neurasthenic young woman, prey to romantic daydreaming and a shallow mysticism. She is childless and not in love with her husband, a man obsessed with the plays of Lope de Vega and Calderón and who likes to potter with mechanical contraptions in his study, and go duck-shooting. He treats his wife affectionately but patronizingly, like a daughter. If Ana’s social stock has fallen in the eyes of Vetusta’s snobs, that of Fermín has risen almost out of recognition, thanks to the fierce ambition of his mother. The daughter of a coal miner and subsistence farmer, Doña Paula sees the Church as a means of advancement. She becomes a priest’s housekeeper, marries a discharged gunner, who is later killed by a she-bear, and has a child. To pay for her son’s education she runs a rough bar frequented by coal miners and finds another job as housekeeper to a saintly canon. She becomes so indispensable to the running of his daily life that when he hesitates to accept the bishopric of Vetusta, he changes his mind when she threatens to leave him. We first meet Fermín at the beginning of the novel standing on top of the cathedral tower, looking down through a spyglass at the city over which he is set on exercising spiritual domination. He is a powerfully built, elegantly dressed, honey-tongued man in his mid- thirties. As canon theologian he preaches the sermon on important public occasions. As vicar-general he rules the diocese. The upper-class women of the city come to him for confession, and he has the bishop in his pocket. Alvaro, the Don Juan, is a handsome, shallow materialist who ultimately proves to be a coward. He heads the city’s liberal faction but has a cosy relationship with the Marquis de Vegallana, the leader of the reactionaries. This complicity mirrors that at national level between the conservatives under Antonio Cánovas and the liberals under Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, who regularly succeeded each other in government after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1875, a system known as the turno pacífico. In Volume Two Fermín’s stock rises further when he succeeds in converting a militant atheist on his deathbed, and manages to persuade Ana to take part barefoot in a Good Friday procession. This, however, proves to be a turning point. Ana comes to see this exhibition as a kind of prostitution and she falls seriously ill, convalescing at the Vegallanas’ out-of-town villa, where the beauty of the spring countryside brings her back to health. Alvaro has declared his love, and she finally surrenders to him. Their affair is revealed to the cuckolded husband through a trick devised by Petra, Ana’s former maid, who is now working for Fermín. The retired magistrate challenges Alvaro to a duel and is mortally wounded. Alvaro flees to Madrid and Ana falls ill yet again. Having recovered, she goes to make her confession to Fermín. Blinded by passion, he starts out of his penitential box like a madman and staggers away. Having begun on top of the cathedral tower, the novel ends with Ana prostrate on its floor, where a homosexual acolyte who is locking up kisses her on the mouth. The momentum of La Regenta’s plot, its descriptive power and psychological insights place it among the best of nineteenth-century realistic novels. What marks it out is the minute examination of Ana’s and Fermín’s motives, expressed through interior monologues, a technique which came to be known as style indirect libre. I don’t remember a work of fiction where the musings of the Catholic conscience are so extensively aired. Alas spares neither clerical nor lay society in Vetusta. Fermín wants Ana as his spiritual child and at the same time is captivated by her physical beauty. Thwarted in love, he entertains murderous thoughts towards his rival, bemoans the fact that he is obliged to wear priestly garb and bribes Petra to spy on her former mistress. The cathedral chapter is a nest of backbiters. Only the otherworldly bishop is pure. Secular life centres on the Gentlemen’s Club and the residences of the Vegallanas. We meet fanatical Catholics and loud-mouthed atheists, former conquests of Alvaro who scheme for Ana to share the same fate, her opinionated old doctor and the feckless son of the marquis and marchioness. Ana’s mother Doña Paula is admirably tough but is at heart a money-grubbing tyrant. Quintanar cuts a ridiculous figure who encourages Alvaro to befriend his wife without suspecting the seducer’s designs, and who shilly-shallies over challenging him to a duel. Only his duck-shooting partner proves a loyal friend. As well as its unflattering portrait of Vetusta, the novel’s frank treatment of sexuality also caused offence. We see it in Ana’s sensual daydreaming, in the way she leaves toothmarks on a cherry in a basket of fruit destined for her eventual lover, in Alvaro’s crude appraisal of women, in the parade of nubile girls in a catechism class presided over by Fermín, and in the public’s prurient interest in Ana’s bare feet in the Good Friday procession. The Bishop of Oviedo said the novel was immoral and had little to recommend it, while a journalist accused Alas of plagiarizing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which had appeared thirty years before. Both novels are about a married woman who is seduced. Both shocked contemporary mores, in Flaubert’s case leading to prosecution for contempt of public and religious morality and good manners. Both novels also have their ugly aspects. In the duel in La Regenta Quintanar is shot in the bladder, and the last, perverted kiss of the novel feels to Ana like ‘the cold and slimy belly of a toad’. In Madame Bovary Emma in her death throes hears the singing of the blind tramp who haunted the staging-post of the coach which she took to meet her lover in Rouen, a symbol of her own corruption. Instead of eyelids he has ‘two yawning bloodstained holes’ from which fluid seeps. Emma is at least able to make the supreme romantic gesture of suicide. Ana is left in limbo, a disgraced, childless widow whose one time soulmate has just recoiled from her in horror. Published a generation later, La Regenta appears more modern in its analysis of the protagonists’ reasoning and their changing moods, whether in the neuroses of Ana, the devouring jealousy of Fermín or the scheming of Alvaro. It is an extraordinary achievement for a man in his early thirties who had previously written short stories but was better known as a scathing literary critic writing under the pen-name Clarín. The speed with which he composed his masterpiece was also remarkable – he completed it in a couple of years. John Rutherford, who provided the excellent translation into English for Penguin Classics, wryly notes that he worked for at least five times as long on the book as the author. An anti-clerical liberal, Alas would continue to write prolifically, whether short stories, essays or newspaper articles. He produced only one more novel, Su único hijo (His Only Son), in 1890, and he died of tuberculosis at the age of 49 in 1901. Julian Barnes has described La Regenta as ‘the foreign classic tardily discovered’. In the English-speaking world at least, it deserves to be much better known.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Simon Scott Plummer 2026
About the contributor
After studying French and German at university, Simon Scott Plummer learnt Spanish, spending three months in Tarragona. He has now embarked on the novels of Alas’s contemporary, Benito Peréz Galdós.
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