SOURCE: "Childhood and Exile: The Cuban Paradise of the Countess of Merlin," in At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 79-96.

In the following excerpt, Molloy shows how Isaacs romanticizes the family in María.

Successive generations of readers have hailed Jorge Isaacs' novel as one of the highlights—perhaps the most brilliant—of nineteenth-century Spanish American fiction. Critics unanimously agree: María, they believe, arrived in a most timely way to legitimate a specific literary discourse, that of Romanticism. Most of those critics, however, have stopped short at this conclusion, unwilling to explore the reason for Maria's phenomenal success or to discover, precisely, what the novel gave legitimacy to. Thus the enormous impact of the novel has been reduced to the fact that it was a well-told story of ill-fated love, more or less in the tradition of Benjamin Constant, made all...