PALACIO VALDES, ARMANDO Spanish novelist and critic. His early writings, pungent essays remarkable for independent judgment and refined humour, were printed in the Revista Europea. His first novel, El Seiiorito Octavio (1881), showed an uncommon power of observation and in Marta y Maria (1883), a portrayal of the struggle between religious vocation and earthly passion, somewhat in the manner of Valera, Palacio Val des achieved a very popular triumph which placed him in the first rank of contemporary Spanish novelists. He followed this up by El Idilio de un enfermo (1883), a most interesting fragment of autobiography and by Jose (1885), a realistic picture of the man ners and customs of seafaring folk, containing passages of ani mated description barely inferior to the finest penned by Pereda himself. The emotional imagination of the writer expressed itself anew in the charming story Riverita (1886), one of whose attrac tive characters develops into the heroine of Maximina (1887) ; and from Maximina, in its turn, is taken the novice who figures as a professed nun among the personages of La Hermana San Sulpicio (1889), in which the love-passages between Zeferino Sanjurjo and Gloria Bermudez are set off with elaborate, romantic descrip tions of Seville. El Cuarto poder (1888) is, as its name implies,
concerned with the details, not always edifying, of journalistic life. La.Espuma (1890) and La Fe (1892), were enthusiastically praised in foreign countries, but in Spain their reception was cold. Subsequently Palacio Valdes returned to his earlier and better manner in Los Majos de Cddiz (1896), in La Alegria del Capitdn Ribot (1889) and in La Aldea Perdida (1903). In these novels, and still more in Tristdn, o el pesimismo (1906), he frees himself from the reproach of undue submission to French influences. His later works, Papeles del Doctor Angelico (I 91 ) , La Novela de un Novelista (1921) and La Hija de Natalia (1923) preserve much of the charm, if not the freshness, of his earlier novels; in any case Palacio Valdes takes a prominent place in modern Spanish literature as a keen analyst of emotion and a sympathetic, delicate, humorous observer. (J. F.-K.)