Woman Triumphant

Woman Triumphant, by Vicente
Blasco Ibañez

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Title: Woman Triumphant (La Maja Desnuda)
Author: Vicente Blasco Ibañez
Translator: Hayward Keniston
Release Date: July 19, 2006 [EBook #18876]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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.
It is possible that my imaginary heroes are vaguely reminiscent of
beings who actually exist. Subconsciousness is the novelist's principal
instrument, and this subconsciousness frequently mocks us, leading us
to mistake for our own creation the things which we have unwittingly
observed in Nature. But despite this, it is unfair, as well as risky, for the
reader to assign the names of real persons to the characters of fiction,
saying, "This is So-and-so."
It would be equally unfair to consider this novel as audacious or of
doubtful morality. The artistic world which I describe in La maja
desnuda cannot be expected to have the same conception of life as the
conventional world. Far from believing it immoral, I consider this one
of the most moral novels I have ever written. And it is for this reason
that, with a full realization of the standards demanded by the
English-reading public, I have not hesitated to authorize the present
translation without palliation or amputation, fully convinced that the
reader will not find anything in this novel objectionable or