"Juanita la Larga (1896) unfolds in a small town in nineteenth-century Spain and tells the story of a young girl's romance with a wealthy widower many years her senior. Appearing here for the first time in English, Valera's novel describes in detail life in an Andalusian hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.

Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century Spain's most respected authors, lived an international life-a career in the diplomatic service, with postings to more than a half dozen countries in Europe and the Americas.

"The story of Dan Fadrique Lopez de Mendoza, a man of seafaring adventures and a deist in the mould of the eighteenth-century philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded pride and a Catholic driven by religious fanaticism, neither of which traits prevented her from having had an adulterous affair as a young woman in Lima, Peru, with Don Fadrique."--Back cover.

Juan Valera (1824-1905) was Spain's only realist with a lifelong insistence that narrative privilege invention over testimony. Throughout Valera's lengthy career, his novels engaged in a running esthetic debate with those of his chief rivals, Galdós and Alas. This debate, chronicled in the present work, led to many compromises and ultimately produced, in the twentieth-century fiction of Valle-Inclán and Unamuno, a novelistic form, also detailed here, that exhibited clear debts to Valera's catalytic influence.

"Don Faustino Lopez de Mendoza, scion of an illustrious but impoverished family of the highest nobility, believes himself destined for great accomplishments in the literary world, sees himself as a poet of the first rank, and immerses himself in grand, if not grandiose, illusions. While living in a provincial Andalusian town and dreaming of triumphing in Madrid's artistic circles, Faustino embarks on a discovery of love with three women. How he extricates himself from each relationship and meets his sad end constitutes the denouement of this searching novel that depicts the deleterious effects of the Romantic malaise that swept through western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.