The Spendthrifts

Benito Pérez Galdós

shk 2018 · Pickle Partners Publishing

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Although Spain is a country which has always had a great attraction for English-speaking people, Spanish novelists are very little known to them. Yet Pérez Galdós is not only the most popular of writers in Spain, whose books are a household word among his countrymen, but he is a major European novelist who ranks with Balzac Dostoevsky and Dickens.

In THE SPENDTHRIFTS (LA DE BRINGAS) the scene is laid in the Royal Palace at Madrid, where Bringas and his wife hold minor posts at the court of Queen Isabella. Rosalía Bringas is a woman whose passion for dress leads her steadily deeper into debt and who is obliged to resort to more and more ludicrous and precarious devices to conceal her extravagance from a model bureaucrat of a husband. Her friend the Marquesa de Tellería is in a similar plight, while Doña Cándida, a superb parasite and bore, has already reached the end of the same downward path. The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of a sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the Queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from the outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness.

Thus THE SPENDTHRIFTS is both an allegory of the ending classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in DON QUIXOTE, of illusions and reality.

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BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS (May 10, 1843 - January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist and leading literary figure in 19th century Spain. A prolific writer, he published 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He is widely considered to be the Spanish equivalent to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. His 1952 play Realidad is regarded as an important piece in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre. He died in Madrid, Spain in 1920, aged 76.

GAMEL WOOLSEY (May 28, 1897 - January 18, 1968) was an American poet, novelist and translator. Born Elizabeth Gammell Woolsey in Aiken, South Carolina, she moved to New York City in 1921, where her first poem appeared in the New York Evening Post in 1922. She left for England in 1928 and moved to Spain in 1930. A collection of 36 poems, Middle Earth, was published in 1931, and in 1939 she published Death’s Other Kingdom, an account of her experiences during the Spanish Civil War.