After the end of the Golden Age, and until the advent of García Lorca, Spain lacked much of its former literary luster. From the late 1600s to the civil war of this century, it was almost as if the country had turned in upon itself to brood over its faded imperial splendor. Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), a well-traveled Spanish aristocrat, autodidact, and standard-bearer of liberal monarchism, believed that the cure for Spain’s cultural insulation was to import naturalism from across the Pyrenees—or at least those aspects of naturalism that a devout Catholic could accept. Pardo Bazán’s La cuestión palpitante (“The Burning Question”), a series of newspaper columns in which she defended the exacting technique, if not the “heretical pessimism,” of Emile Zola, set off a firestorm of debate among Spanish intellectuals when it was published in the early 1880s.

A brave and sagacious critic, Pardo Bazán was not out to offend the conservative sensibilities of her countrymen. Rather, she was engaged in a patriotic project to modernize Spanish letters, and so she measured Spanish works against the best that was known and thought in the world and let the chips fall where they may. Benito Pérez Galdós she compared to Dostoevsky, and found that the former survived the comparison. José María de Pereda she lined up against Balzac and Flaubert, and found the Spaniard wanting. Pereda’s El buey suelto(“The Untethered Ox”), an indictment of the bachelor life, was, she wrote, an example of the novelist’s failure to