PÉREZ GALDÓS, BENITO. — Writer, b. at Las Palmas (Canary Islands) on 10 May 1843, d. at Madrid on 4 January 1920. He lived almost always in Madrid, whose life and customs he described. Although a deputy in 1885 and 1906, he followed political life with greater interest than active participation. In 1897 he became a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua.
He spent his final years afflicted by the hostility of his opponents and by blindness. His literary production (117 works) is usually grouped into historical novels (the four series of Episodios nacionales, in which the history of nineteenth-century Spain is narrated); realist novels (including Doña Perfecta; Gloria; Marionela; La familia de León Roch; Fortunata y Jacinta; Angel Guerra; Misericordia); theatrical works (notably Realidad; La Loca de la Casa; El Abuelo); and political and literary articles and memoirs. Although at times somewhat careless and hasty in his exposition, P. G. is among the greatest Spanish narrators of the nineteenth century. In him traditional realism is combined with a wealth of imagination and a reflection of contemporary literary demands. His innumerable characters throb with intense emotional life, in which painful distrust of the world and its institutions is fused with an understanding of the infinite misery of humanity, which appeared to him as something tragically irremediable. Despite this pessimistic vision of life, P. G. discovers in it a primitive human goodness, at times unconscious, at times deliberately concealed. He was opposed to every form of religious fanaticism and intolerance, but he did not understand practicing and militant Catholicism and, indeed, adopted a distinctly anticlerical position (cf. Doña Perfecta; La familia de León Roch). This attitude did not, however, exclude an aspiration to a simple and sincere religiosity, not confined to the external aspects of a purely formal cult.