In Doña Inés there is the Nietzschean Eternal Return; there is the Proustian evocation of the past through a physical sensation; there is an historical or demiurgic … vision of change and the passage of time; there is time as duration, in the Bergsonian sense; and there are many other variations on the temporal theme in this short, poetic and eloquent novel…. There are also, of course, the things that Azorín loved and described so well with his hawklike vision. In Doña Inés the things themselves are images or symbols of the various aspects of time; they are the objective correlatives (in Eliot's sense) of the emotions that the contemplation of time and its effects produces in the author. (pp. 250-51)

Chapter II contains a detailed and loving description of the protagonist in the year of the novel, 1840…. At the end of the chapter...