WOMAN TRIUMPHANT ***
Produced by Carlo Traverso, Janet Blenkinship, and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net.
WOMAN TRIUMPHANT
(LA MAJA DESNUDA)
BY
VICENTE BLASCO IBAÑEZ
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
BY
HAYWARD KENISTON
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
[Illustration]
NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE Copyright, 1920, BY K. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
First printing March, 1920
Second printing March, 1020
Third printing March, 1920
Fourth printing March, 1920
Fifth printing March, 1920
Sixth printing March, 1920
Seventh printing March. 1920
Eighth printing March, 1920
Ninth printing April, 1920
Tenth printing April, 1920
Eleventh printing April, 1920
Twelfth printing April, 1920
Thirteenth printing April, 1920
Fourteenth printing April, 1920
Printed In the United States of America
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The title of this novel in the original, _La maja desnuda_, "The Nude Maja," is also the name of one of the most famous pictures of the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya.
The word _maja_ has no exact equivalent in English or in any of the modern languages. Literally, it means "bedecked," "showy," "gaudily attired," "flashy," "dazzling," etc., and it was applied at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth to a certain class of gay women of the lower strata of Madrid society notorious for their love of dancing and their fondness for exhibiting themselves conspicuously at bull-fights and all popular celebrations. The great ladies of the aristocracy affected the free ways and imitated the picturesque dress of the _maja_; Goya made this type the central figure of many of his genre paintings, and the dramatist Ramón de la Cruz based most of his _sainetes_--farcical pieces in one act--upon the customs and rivalries of these women. The dress invented by the _maja_, consisting of a short skirt partly covered by a net with berry-shaped tassels, white _mantilla_ and high shell-comb, is considered all over the world as the national costume of Spanish women.
When the novel first appeared in Spain some years ago, a certain part of the Madrid public, unduly evil-minded, thought that it had discovered the identity of the real persons whom I had taken as models to draw my characters. This claim provoked a scandalous sensation and gave my book an unwholesome notoriety. It was thought that the protagonists of _La maja desnuda_ were an illustrious Spanish painter of world-wide fame, who is my friend, and an aristocratic lady very celebrated at the time but now forgotten. I protested against this unwarranted and fantastic interpretation. Although I draw my characters from life, I do so only in a very fragmentary way (like all the great creative novelists whom I admire as masters in the field of fiction), using the materials gathered in my observations to form completely new types which are the direct and legitimate offspring of my own imagination. To use a figure: as a novelist I am a painter, not a photographer. Although I seek my inspiration in reality, I copy it in accordance with my own way of seeing it; I do not reproduce it with the mechanical servility of the photographic camera.
