SOURCE: Pérez, Janet. “Winners, Losers and Casualities in Pardo Bazán's Battle of the Sexes.” Letras Peninsulares 5, no. 3 (winter 1992-93): 347-56.

In the following essay, Pérez elucidates the male-female relationships—especially courtship and matrimony—in Pardo Bazán's short fiction.

In the 1990 four-volume edition of Pardo Bazán's complete tales by Juan Paredes Núñez, more than 400 short stories originally published in collections by the author appear in association with almost 200 more, previously published only in periodicals. The vast majority of these are unstudied, and given the cannonical view of the short story as a minor genre, critical neglect may not be surprising, despite the writer's importance. Strangely, however, scholarly neglect extends to a majority of her long novels as well, with attention concentrated on only a fraction of Pardo Bazán's production. Perusal of the secondary bibliography reveals insistent re-examination of her Naturalism, her relationship...