El Comendador Mendoza

Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905) was a Spanish realist author, diplomat, and politician. He was born in Cabra, a province of Cordoba, and after graduating from the University of Granada with a degree in law he entered upon a diplomatic career. Over the next fifty years he filled a number of positions in far-flung locations, becoming a member of Spanish legations at Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, and St Petersburg. After his return to Madrid in 1859 he became one of the editors of the liberal journal El Contemporaneo, and in 1865 was appointed Minister to Frankfurt. After the revolution of 1868 he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State and Director of Public Instruction, and later took up ministerial positions in Lisbon, Washington, and Brussels, becoming Ambassador to Vienna from 1893-95. He was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1900. Throughout his diplomatic and political career he wrote a number of works which are acknowledged as among the highest his country's literature has produced. Pepita Jimenez, which first appeared as a serial in 1874, is his best-known work and has been translated into many languages. El Comendador Mendoza (1877) tells the story of Don Fadrique Lopez de Mendosa, a man of seafaring adventures, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded pride whose Catholic belief verges on religious fanaticism and who, despite these traits, had had an adulterous affair with Mendoza as a young woman in Lima, Peru. The conflict that plays out between these principal characters, now back in Spain, centres on Mendoza's discovery of his previously unknown daughter with Dona Blanca who has now reached marriageable age. A contest of wills ensues that effects changes in both as the fate of their daughter hangs in the balance. This novel, rich in characterisation and the exploration of human foibles, was one of Valera's favourites of his own works. Reprinted from an original Spanish language edition.