We’re warned early on that although people feel themselves to be unique and complex, their specialness is generally “an amalgamation . . . of the ideas floating around in the metaphysical atmosphere of the age, like . . . invisible bacteria.” This is part of what makes Tristana a novel of the late nineteenth century rather than just a folktale. The story will be ironic; it will be about the ordinary illusion of specialness, yet it will also reinforce that illusion.

From the outset, matters seem unlikely to end well. “Socially” speaking—in the terms of Henry James, say—Tristana’s position is not so much ambiguous as scarcely mentionable. Benito Pérez Galdós was James’s exact contemporary and understood his society no less well than James did his own, but this isn’t a novel by James or about his world, and its ironies are more robust. Tristana, we’re told in the riddling way of a folktale, “was neither daughter, niece, or wife” to Don Lope, but “she belonged to him.” Here, the always fluid narrative viewpoint is that of local gossip. She belongs to him, people say, like “a tobacco pouch,” and if that’s a double entendre, so it’s probably meant to be. Tristana isn’t just a receptacle, though, nor is she nada, which people also say about her. Galdós liked women—really liked them, as individuals—and his novels are keenly alert to what it was to be them. It’s striking how many of his stories have women’s names. Tristana was published in 1892 and by then every Western reader knew Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but those are about married women who have taken their husband’s names. Few of the great pre-twentieth-century fictions written by men take their titles unequivocally from a heroine (Pamela is an exception; Evelina and Emma are by women writers; Eugénie Grandet and Thérèse Raquin come close but are so called because of the different kinds of power the heroines’ eponymous fathers and cousins have over them). Yet Galdós wrote Marianela (1878) and Fortunata and Jacinta (1887) as well as Tristana, and the third of these shows signs of wanting to become a feminist work. Its “substance,” according to one contemporary critic, is “the wakening of the consciousness of a woman who rebels against a society that condemns her to everlasting shame, and is incapable of offering her a respectable way of earning her living.” The reviewer was Spain’s first important woman novelist and first woman academic, Emilia Pardo Bazán. As it happens, she and Galdós had not long before ended a love affair, so she may be assumed to have read the story with particular interest. He was forty-nine, the same age at which his roué hero’s counting of the years “stuck fast . . . as if an instinctive terror of the number fifty had halted him on the much-feared boundary of the half century.” Don Lope is fifty-seven when the book opens, and both he and, increasingly, Tristana realize that whether or not his arithmetic is stuck, he won’t get any younger. But aging isn’t mathematically regulated, and in Tristana’s case it will be violently accelerated by illness and surgery.

How the reader interprets this disabling misfortune to a large extent determines how the book is understood and evaluated. Pardo Bazán and, following her, some recent critics have seen it as at best an arbitrary way of moving the plot along, at worst a peculiarly male kind of fictional revenge on a woman for daring to be free (Tristana’s romance with Horacio begins, after all, on one of the long walks she used to take with the maid, Saturna, despite the crude old Spanish proverb that said ‘A woman’s place is at home with a broken leg’). In life, though, illness and disability do afflict people and alter their relationships, and generally in ways that seem to have no meaning. Galdós’s plotting may be rough-and-ready, but it’s all too real. Among the realities that concern him is the role played in life by luck.

We’re nudged by the backstory into wondering where things began to go wrong for Tristana (does her name imply something essentially sad in her?), or for any of the other characters. Like most women in her world, she has been given next to no education—this even though her mother, Josefina, had literary ambitions. Her father, Antonio, was unlucky with money; only Don Lope’s generosity saved the family from ruin. Released from prison, the demoralized Antonio soon dies, and his widow falls victim to what would now be called an obsessive-compulsive disorder. (How vividly madness draws out Galdós’s always observant sympathy.) Josefina dies, too, handing her daughter over to Don Lope to look after—a responsibility that he abuses, and not only in today’s terms. The narrative asserts, albeit in Galdós’s dry, hard-to-gauge way, that Don Lope’s “moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns.” We hear about this mutilación long before Tristana is operated on, but it seems relevant that the same word is used then.

Others have been unlucky, too. Saturna’s husband was killed in a workplace accident, so she became Don Lope’s servant and put her son into institutional care, along with children born blind or deaf, whose plights Galdós again dwells on. (Luis Buñuel makes more of this boy in his powerful, very free film adaptation.) Don Lope endures the consequences of the liberality he seems to have been born with, and which is one of his more appealing traits.