Mujeres y finanzas en la España del siglo XIX: prestamistas y especuladoras en las novelas de Benito Pérez Galdós

Abstract

Recent scholarship has begun to challenge the tendency to assign a passive economic role to nineteenth-century women. It is now recognised that, despite legal constraints, they engaged in a variety of economic activities. Among scholars of Galdós’s work, the character of the unproductive female spendthrift, so common in his narrative, has received due attention. In this article, however, I will analyse several female characters who participate actively in the dubious finances of the society depicted by Galdós. I hope to contribute in this way to the study of the participation of middle-class women in the financial world of nineteenth-century Spain, and to show that their economic life did not always conform to the literary trope of the passive female consumer.