Commander Mendoza - Juan Valera

Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905), one of
nineteenth-century Spain's most respected authors, lived an
international life-a career in the diplomatic service, with
postings to more than a half dozen countries in Europe and the
Americas.
Cosmopolitan, cultured, and urbane, Valera was fluent
in a number of languages and read widely in all of them.
A
serious student of his own and foreign literatures, he wrote
novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and literary criticism, in
addition to carrying on a voluminous correspondence with several
of his fellow Spanish writers and friends.
The unifying thread
of his work is "art for art's sake," that is, beauty as the end
and purpose of inspiration and creativity, a stance he commented
on at some length in his introduction to the 1886 Appleton
English translation of his first novel, Pepita Jimenez (1874),
the tale of a young seminarian who falls in love with a young
widow.Commander Mendoza (1877) tells the story of Don Fadrique Lopez de
Mendoza, a man of seafaring adventures and a deist in the mold of
the eighteenth-century philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de
Solis, a woman of unbounded pride and a Catholic driven by
religious fanaticism, neither of which traits prevented her from
having had an adulterous affair as a young woman in Lima, Peru,
with Don Fadrique.
The conflict that plays out in Commander
Mendoza, with both principals now back in Spain, centers on the
Commander's discovery of the marriageable daughter that he did
not know he had, and it turns into a contest of wills that
effects changes in both of them as the fate of their daughter
hangs in the balance.
Rich in characterization and exploration
of human foibles, it is a work that continued to stand high on
the list of Valera's favorites, for in 1885 he wrote in a letter
to a friend: "What would please me would be to continue writing
novels like Pepita Jimenez and Commander Mendoza."Robert Fedorchek is a professor emeritus of modern languages andliteratures at Fairfield University (Connecticut).
He haspublished fifteen books of translations of nineteenth-centurySpanish literature, including three other novels by Juan Valera.He has also translated numerous fairy tales by Valera, Antonio deTrueba, Cecilia Bohl de Faber, and Concha Castroviejo for Marvels& Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies.Susan McKenna is an assistant professor of Spanish at the
University of Delawawhere she specializes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature.She is the author of Crafting the Female Subject:
NarrativeInnovation in the Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazan.