• This unique epistolary collection contains more than 260 letters that deal with literary and social topics, but above all, intimate and everyday issues, which reflect the great friendship between Pereda and Marañón.
• “Las cosas de la vida” unveils twenty years of the Cantabrian writer's personal and novelistic trajectory, from his first novel to his admission to the Royal Spanish Academy, as well as the family fortunes and tragedies that marked his life.
  
• Fundación Banco Santander also offers the public, free of charge, an interview with Jaime Olmedo and ten podcasts with a selection of Pereda's audio narrated letters.
  

Madrid, January 19, 2024 - PRESS RELEASE

Under the title Las cosas de la vida. Cartas de José María de Pereda a Manuel Marañón (1877-1897), Fundación Banco Santander has compiled this unpublished collection of letters by José María de Pereda in a new volume of the Fundamental Works Collection. Pereda being one of the great Spanish novelists of the second half of the 19th century. Thus, for the first time, twenty years of intimate correspondence are made available to the reader, where both personal and literary matters of both are addressed, shedding light on the most intimate and unknown facets of the writer, as well as the joys and misfortunes that marked the lives of both families over the years.

Manuel Marañón was not only his "dearest" friend, as the great Cantabrian author expressed on more than one occasion, but also "my alter ego, my other self", as he recounts in a letter dated February 5, 1895.

The lives of both men were interwoven in this intense collection of letters that had been considered lost and that Fundación Banco Santander now publishes in this volume. There are more than 260 letters that Pereda wrote to Marañón and that remained unpublished, preserved by the recipient's family in the archive of the Fundación Cigarral de Menores de Toledo. 

The epistolary is a unique collection that covers the Cantabrian writer's entire novelistic career (1877-1897), from his first novel to his admission to the Royal Spanish Academy, i.e., from the beginnings of his narrative career after the costume paintings to his academic culmination and official recognition in which characters such as Galdós, Menéndez Pelayo, Clarín and Pardo Bazán are intermingled. There are numerous personal and literary matters that appear in the letters, although it is exciting, above all, to understand the writer's profession at that time and to observe, in unique detail, the literary process from beginning to end: from the first idea or narrative argument to the last technical details and material details of the edition, including the dissemination of works such as Sotileza, De tal palo tal astilla or Peñas Arriba, and other works that marked his career, to the reading public and the literary critics of the time.

"This book is important because these letters were thought to be lost," explains Jaime Olmedo, responsible for the volume, "It was known to be a very significant epistolary collection, because Marañón was Pereda's man in Madrid, and we have confirmed that this is so: we have discovered an epistolary collection that covers 20 complete years and constitutes the testimony of the writer's career, from his early days to his full recognition."

The letters were found in the Estate that Gregorio Marañón bought in Toledo in 1921. It was Gregorio Marañon y Bertran de Lys who reported the discovery and enabled Jaime Olmedo to begin transcribing the letters.

These letters are essential to show the daily life and personality of José María Pereda, as a writer and as a man, the role of his family's vicissitudes in his writing and his character, as well as being a valuable document on the literary and human contexts of that period and the cultural dialogues between the center and the periphery of the Spanish geography.

"It is a very intense epistolary, with very frequent and long letters. It has literary content, although not only," Olmedo continues. "It was always thought that they were decisive, and now we have been able to confirm it. Pereda had never written so much to one person. They are letters to his best friend.

Jaime Olmedo, philologist, and technical director of the Diccionario Biográfico and the "Historia Hispánica" portal at the Royal Academy of History. He is also professor of Spanish Literature at the Faculty of Philology of the Complutense University and vice president of the Duques de Soria Foundation. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences of Toledo and the Royal Academy of Sciences, Fine Arts and Noble Arts of Cordoba. 

The volume is available in both physical and ebook format. Fundación Banco Santander also makes available free of charge on its website an interview with Jaime Olmedo and ten podcasts with a selection of Pereda's audio narrated letters.