La regenta

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La Regenta
Author Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"
Country Spain
Language Spanish
Genre(s) Realist Novel
Publisher (copyright expired)
Publication date 1885
Media type Print
Statue dedicated to La Regenta in Oviedo
Statue dedicated to La Regenta in Oviedo

La Regenta is a realist novel by Spanish author Leopoldo Alas y Ureña, also known as Clarín, published in 1884 and 1885.

The action is located in Vetusta (a province capital city, very identifiable with Oviedo, capital of Asturias), where the main character of the work, Ana Ozores "La Regenta", marries the former prime magistrate of the city, Víctor Quintanar, a kind man but fussy and much older than her. Feeling sentimentally abandoned, Ana begins to be courted by the province casanova Álvaro Mesía. To complete the circle, canon D. Fermín de Pas (confessor of Ana) also falls in love with her and becomes the unmentionable rival of Mesía. A great panorama of secondary characters, portrayed by Clarín with merciless irony, completes the human landscape of the novel.

The author uses the city of Vetusta as a symbol of vulgarity, inculture and hypocrisy. On the other hand, Ana incarnates the tortured ideality that perishes progressively before a hypocritical society. With these forces in tension, the asturian writer inclemently constructs a cruel story on the Spanish provincial life, fitted to his leader classes, in the days of the Restoration, in the end of the 19th century.

(Spanish) Full text of the novel can be found here