Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"

Leopoldo Alas built his reputation in Madrid and then Oviedo as 'Clarín,' the sharpest and most feared literary critic in Spain, powerful enough that his praise or scorn could make or break a career; fiction was a sideline to his law professorship and journalism.

La Regenta (1884–85) turned that critical eye on his own adopted city, thinly disguised as 'Vetusta,' a panoramic study of provincial hypocrisy centered on Ana Ozores, the young wife of an elderly ex-magistrate, caught between a worldly cathedral canon's spiritual seduction and a local Don Juan's literal one.

Its debt to Flaubert's clinical irony was open and enormous, but the novel is entirely his own in its comedy and its cruelty toward Vetusta's clergy and gentry alike. He kept writing incisive short stories and criticism until his early death from tuberculosis in 1901, at forty-nine, having never written a second novel to match it.