The Regent II

La Regenta is the first novel by Leopoldo Alas “Clarín”. It was published in two volumes in 1884 and 1885 and, in the words of its author, “was written as loose articles” that “as I was writing I was sending” to the publisher.
It is one of the best Spanish novels of the nineteenth century, due to the psychological complexity of its protagonists, and their social and personal conflicts. Its central theme is the adultery of Ana Ozores. This conflict develops in opposition to the customs, history and values of Vetusta, an imaginary city.

With October the good weather dies in Vetusta. In mid-November the Sun usually shines a week, but as if it were already another Sun, which is in a hurry and makes its farewell visits preoccupied with the preparations of the winter trip. It can be said that it is an irony of good weather what is called the summer of San Martín. The Vetustenses do not trust those flatteries of light and heat and shelter and look for their peculiar way of spending their lives swimming during the odious season that lasts until the end of April next. They are amphibians that prepare to live underwater the season that their fate condemns them to this element. Some protest every year by pretending to be new and saying: “But you see what the weather!” Others, more philosophers, console themselves thinking that the fertility and beauty of the soil is due to the many rains. “Either the sky or the ground, everything cannot be.”
Ana Ozores was not one of those who resigned herself. Every year, when I heard the bells toll sadly on the day of the Saints, in the afternoon, I felt a nervous anguish that found its way in the exterior objects, and above all in the ideal perspective of a winter, of another wet, monotonous, endless winter, which began with the clamor of those bronzes.
That year the sadness had appeared at the usual time.

Fragment of the work

Reference edition: Madrid, Librería de Fernando Fe, 1900.