José María de Pereda
1833–1906
Biography
José María de Pereda y Sánchez de Porrúa was a Spanish novelist of the realist period. He was born in 1833 in Polanco, in Cantabria, and died in 1906. He grew up near Santander, went to Madrid for a few years to prepare for a military career that he dropped, and then returned home to write. He started as a journalist, contributing articles to a Santander newspaper. His first notable collection, Escenas montañesas (1864), made his name in the province. He also entered politics as a Carlist and was elected a deputy in 1871, and in 1872 he was named a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
His novels are set mostly in La Montaña, the mountain region of Cantabria. They praise the customs and character of country people and set them against the corrupting ways of the cities. He was a political conservative who opposed the revolution of 1868, and his novel Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera, from the late 1870s, mocks the Revolution and the self-interest of the newly rich who used liberal politics for their own gain. Sotileza follows the fishing community of the Cantabrian coast, where a love between an orphan girl raised by fishermen and the son of a distinguished seaman is broken by social class. Peñas arriba, from 1895, is his last major novel.
Three of his books are on this site. Peñas arriba is a book with little plot, in which a young man named Marcelo spends a winter at his uncle's house in the mountain village of Tablanca, grows fond of the place and ends by settling there. His eldest son's death in 1893, while he was working on the book, left him so low that he almost stopped writing. Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera, a satire, and Sotileza, a novel of the coast, complete the set and show the range of his work.
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Books
Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera
by José María de Pereda
A village of the Spanish north is thrown into confusion by the new liberal politics and the schemes of its petty bosses. Pereda's satirical novel is a comic account of electoral intrigue, rural gossip and the collapse of the old order. This book uses the racial and other slurs…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Peñas arriba
by José María de Pereda
Marcelo, a young man from Madrid, travels up into the Cantabrian mountains to the old family house of his uncle and finds a way of life he had forgotten. Pereda's late novel is a hymn to the highlands and the old patriarchal values.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Sotileza
by José María de Pereda
Sotileza, a foundling raised in the old fishing quarter of Santander, grows up between a rich merchant's son, a young sailor and a boy of the quay. Pereda's masterpiece is a rich portrait of the sea, its people and their speech.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.