Title:  Dona Perfecta

Author:  Benito Perez Galdos

Release Date:  April 28, 2005 [EBook #15725]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Donaperfecta

Por
Benito Perez Galdos

With an introduction and notes by
A. R. Marsh

Vocabularyby
Steven T. Byington

=The Athenaeum Press=
Ginn and company—­propriet
ors—­Boston—­U.S.A.

PREFACE

This edition of one of the best known of modern Spanish novels has been prepared for the use of college classes in Spanish that have already mastered the elements of Spanish grammar, but have not yet had much practice in reading.  The editor has found by actual experience that it is safe to undertake the story in three or four months from the time when the study of the language is begun, that is, in the second half of the first year’s work in the subject.  As the book is not a long one, it should be possible to read it entire before the close of the year.  Indeed, with an earnest class, even less time than this will be found to suffice.

The novel is printed exactly (save correction of printer’s errors) as it appears in the eighth Spanish edition (Madrid, 1896).  At the same time, great pains have been taken to make the orthography and accentuation conform in all respects to the standard of the last edition of the Spanish Academy’s Dictionary.  The Notes are considerably fuller than is customary in college editions of modern works in foreign languages.  This has been made necessary in part by the dreadful insufficiency of the existing Spanish-English dictionaries, and in part by the editor’s desire to afford the student some aid in dealing with grammatical peculiarities not fully discussed in the more available text-books.  As a further help to grammatical study, numerous references have been inserted to Ramsey’s Text-Book of Modern Spanish (New York, 1894) and to Knapp’s Grammar of the Modern Spanish Language (Boston, 1891).

A.R.M.

Cambridge, Massachusetts March, 1897

In the new impression of this book the accentuation has been conformed to the new (fourteenth) edition of the Academy’s Dictionary, a small number of misprints have been corrected, and a vocabulary has been added.