La arrepentida of José Pallés y Llordés: Models of women in the Spanish regency

Abstract

In the midst of that anticlerical and secularizing atmosphere that Spain experienced throughout the 19th century, Catholic writers found in the narrative –and especially in the historical novel–, the ideal genre from which, with a mixture of didacticism and entertainment, transmit principles, values and the fundamental teachings of a Catholicism increasingly relegated in all areas of society by the arrival of modernity. In addition to this, the Constitution of 1876 that established and defended freedom of worship in Spain, forced the Church to soften many of its attitudes and seek more conciliatory positions. This article proposes an approach to the figure and work of the Catalan writer and journalist José Pallés y Llordés (1846-1905), probably one of the least studied within the framework of Catholic writers. We will focus on his main novel La arrepentida (1905), paying attention both to the author’s own characteristics within the framework established by the genre, and to its evolution from mid-nineteenth century ti the beginning of the twentieth century.