Benito Pérez Galdós

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Pérez Galdós, detail of an oil painting by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida By courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America

Benito Pérez Galdós (May 10, 1843 – January 4, 1920) was a Spanish novelist. Considered by many second only to Cervantes in stature, Pérez Galdós was the greatest Spanish realist novelist. Born in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, he moved to Madrid at the age of 20 where he spent most of his adult life. Within Spain his most popular works are the earlier works — the Episodios nacionales (46 volumes). Outside Spain it was the Novelas españolas contemporáneas the ones that grip the imagination.

The early novels mix historical and fictional characters and are the result of documentary research. As with Balzac, some characters appear in separate novels. They cover the period from 1805 to the end of the century. We see glimpses of Benito's liberal and anti-clerical views, which become more developed in the contemporary novels. In Doña Perfecta (1876) a young liberal comes to a stiflingly clerical town. In Miau (1888) a pretentious family lose their livelihood when the father, an elderly civil servant, loses his job through a change in government, and eventually commits suicide. Pérez Galdós' masterpiece is Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–1887). It is almost as long as War and Peace and concerns the fortunes of four characters: a young man about town, his wife, his lower-class mistress and her husband. Ángel Guerra (1891) is the story of an unbalanced man who attempts to win a devout and inaccessible woman, swinging from agnosticism to Catholicism in the process. Pérez Galdós is more realistic than Balzac or Tolstoy, and like Dickens, depicts middle-class snobbishness and fear of poverty.

In 1886 he was appointed by then prime minister Praxedes Mateo Sagasta as the (absent) deputy for the town and district of Guayama, Puerto Rico at the Madrid parliament; he never visited the place, but had a representative inform him of the status of the area, and felt a duty to represent its inhabitants appropriately. In 1897, Pérez Galdós was elected to the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy). In 1907 he became a deputy for the Republican Party in the parliament. He went blind in 1912 but continued to dictate his books for the rest of his life. Pérez Galdós died at the age of 76. Shortly before his death, a statue in his honor was constructed in the Parque del Retiro, the most popular park in Madrid, financed solely by public donations.

Pérez Galdós was and is massively popular in Spain, where he is considered the Spanish equivalent of Tolstoy. However, his chance of international fame was sabotaged by his own jealous countrymen, when they launched a slander campaign against him after learning that he would be nominated for the Nobel Prize^{[citation needed]}. As late as 1950 few of his works were available in English translation (although he has been slowly growing in popularity in the English-speaking world ever since).

His plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, though Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre.

There have been many films of his novels: Beauty in Chains (Doña Perfecta) was directed by Elsie Jane Wilson in 1918. Luis Buñuel failed to credit the fact that Viridiana (1961) was based on Halma. He made another adaptation with Nazarín in 1959, and his Tristana (1970) was similarly based on Pérez Galdós. El Abuelo (The Grandfather), filmed by José Luis Garci in 1998, was released internationally a year later.