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Spanish writer, intellectual, and feminist Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) was a master of the short form and practitioner of the style that became known as naturalism. This collection of twenty-seven translated stories, marked by their brevity, reveal the narrative complexity, keen psychological insight, and careful attention to realistic detail that was characteristic of her work. Some fictionalize actual occurrences ("The Pardon," "A Galician Mother," and "The Lady Bandit"); others are a defense of subjugated women ("The Guilty Woman" and "The Faithful Fiancee").

One highly symbolic story, "The White Horse," qualifies Pardo Bazan as the godmother of the Generation of '98, the group of writers who exhorted Spain to rid itself of inertia, apathy, and fixation on past glories. Still others resemble contemporary suspense thrillers ("The Cuff Link" and "The White Hair"). Influenced by the work of Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola, Pardo Bazan's themes are fear, love, hatred, forgiveness, cruelty, poverty, repentance, homesickness, and madness-that is, naked reality.