LA REGENTA / THE REGENT
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Autor:
Leopoldo Enrique García-Alas y Ureña
Country:
Spain (ES)
Book Theme:
Classic novels and Authors representing your country culture
Publisher:
EDICIONES AKAL
Publishing Year:
1999
Leopoldo Alas García-Ureña, known by his pen name Clarín, was born in Zamora. He began his studies in León and attended high school in Oviedo, the city in which his best-known works are set.
At the age of 16, he strengthened his progressive and republican convictions, which marked his literary work and especially his journalistic work.
In 1869 he began to study law, but in 1871 he moved to Madrid to obtain his doctorate and study literature at the Central University, where he became known as a journalist.
In 1882 Alas was appointed professor at the University of Saragossa and that same year he married. A year later, he returned to Oviedo as professor of Roman Law and Natural Law at the University of Oviedo. From then on he never left the capital of Asturias, where he died.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
This is the great 19th-century novel of Spanish literature. The novel is set in Vetusta, where Ana Ozores lives, a bourgeois woman who marries Víctor Quintanar, former regent of the city’s court, hence the name of the novel “La Regenta”.
Ana is much younger than her husband and, more than love, she feels friendship and gratitude towards him. She feels lonely and bored, frustrated at not being a mother and wishes for something better in her life, as her marriage does not go beyond pure friendship and she is sentimentally abandoned.
While Victor enjoys his hobby of hunting, Ana takes refuge in religion and begins to frequent the church in the city, trying to escape the monotony. There she meets Fermín, a young priest, who soon becomes interested in Ana. Ana will also feel attracted to Fermín and this situation will alter the lives of both of them, who will not be able to relate to each other outside the ecclesiastical sphere.
It is then that Don Álvaro appears, a man who has been in love with Ana for years and with whom she will end up having a relationship.
Fermín, jealous, tells Ana’s husband about her affair with Don Álvaro and, as a result, Víctor fights a duel to the death with his wife’s lover.
