Here is the masterpiece by the father of the modern Spanish novel: a tour de force of nineteenth-century fiction, a tale of jealousy and adultery--set against a vividly drawn panorama of Madrid.

In Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós is revered as the heir to Cervantes, a literary giant read alongside Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. Fortunata and Jacinta, first published in 1887, is his magnum opus. It tells the story of the two women in the life of Juanito Santa Cruz, restless heir to a textile fortune. Fortunata is a girl from the slums--feisty and generous, sensual and amoral. She bears Juanito two children. Jacinta, his aristocratic wife, remains childless and preoccupied with her husband's wanderings. The obsessive rivalry between these women plays out against the backdrop of Madrid--the rowdy cafés, the darkened drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie, the stinking tenements of the Barrios Bajos, the shops, and the markets (not to mention a convent, an orphanage, and even a lunatic asylum)--at a time of heightened political and social tension between the Revolution of 1868 and the Restoration of 1875.