Modernization arrived late and fitfully in Spain. Democratic government, secular philosophy, industrialization, urbanization, and social reform for women and the working classes only began to have a major role in Spanish life after the September Revolution of 1868. It is no coincidence that at the same time as Spain undertook social and ideological modernization, Spanish fiction picked up the thread it had dropped after the major accomplishments of the picaresque genre and Don Quijote in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The novel, a genre whose form and length equipped it to reflect multiple social phenomena, accompanied Spain on its belated journey into the modern era, recording it, critiquing it, and helping to shape it.

Standing out among the novelists who chronicled the rapid changes in Spanish social and political life after the ill-fated “Revolution” are Juan Valera, José María Pereda, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bázan, Leopoldo Alas (“Clarín”), Armando Palacio Valdés, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Their ideological positions are widely divergent, and in many ways their novelistic production of the period following the 1868 Revolution represents a national forum on the issues - the position of the bourgeoisie (the third estate) and the working classes vis-à-vis public policy and decision-making, the role of the church (especially the clergy) in public and private life, and women's place in society - foregrounded during the brief revolutionary period (1868-1875).