Tristana is a novel where love, hate and power converge into a triangle of domination and frustration.Galdós', following the ideas of the Free Teaching Institution, intervened in the arena of the debate around the emancipation of women and their incorporation into the public sphere. Tristana, a young woman subjected to the rule of the tyrannical Don Lope, idealistically tries to find her purpose on life but she ends trapped by the rules of a world dominated by men who only see her as the object of their desire. Written in an experimental manner that defies the boundaries of theatre, epistolary and novel genres, Galdós' displays the purest nature of his characters by presenting their contradictions, weaknesses and virtues. He uses a deliberately ambiguous style that seeks to address fundamental questions regarding the unbalances of a Madrid in times of turbulence, but leaves the reader to draw their own meaning.

An NYRB Classics Original Don Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, lovely Tristana. Don Lope takes her into his house and before long he takes her to bed. It’s an arrangement that Tristana accepts more or less unquestioningly— that is, until she meets the handsome young painter Horacio. Then she actively rebels, sets out to educate herself, reveals tremendous talents, and soon surpasses her lover in her open defiance of convention. One thing is for sure: Tristana will be her own woman. And when it counts Don Lope will be there for her. Benito Pérez Galdós, one of the most sophisticated and delightful of the great European novelists, was a clear-eyed, compassionate, and not-a-little amused observer of the confusions, delusions, misrepresentations, and perversions of the mind and heart. He is the unsurpassed chronicler of the reality show called real life.

A SPANISH GIRL IN 1890'S SPAIN ATTEMPTS TO DEFY THE CONVENTIONS OF HER TIMES.

Colin Partridge's critical excursus on the novel Tristana and its reception opens with an account of diametrically opposed readings by Galdos' contemporaries, Bazan, the feminist, and the novelist Clarin. Partridge then proceeds to relate the sources of Tristana in Galdos' personal experience, notably his relations with a succession of women. The closing section of Partridge's useful book is a critique of Luis Bunuel's film Tristana (1970), which shows how Bunuel employs cinematic equivalents of Galdos' cinematic narrative devices.

A SPANISH GIRL IN 1890'S SPAIN ATTEMPTS TO DEFY THE CONVENTIONS OF HER TIMES.