In his first work, Juan Valera achieved one of the greatest sales success in the second half of the 19th century.
This was politician and writer Juan Valera’s debut published in 1874. A very clever man, Valera convinced society that it was a manuscript found in the archives of an Andalusian cathedral, telling the stories of some characters whose names Valera had to change to protect their identity. Nothing could be further from the truth since it was a work by the writer himself which recounted, in a realist way, the love between seminarian Luís de Vargas and the widow Pepita Jiménez.
The work was unusually successful for the period. In addition to selling over one hundred thousand copies and being translated into ten languages, in 1895 the composer Isaac Albéniz created a musical piece with the same name based on the book.
