Between 1881 and 1897, Benito Perez Galdos, generally acknowledged as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist, composed some twenty "contemporary" novels, which Geoffrey Ribbans characterizes as the peak of his achievement. This monumental study traces the evolution of the many strands that make up one of them: the long and complex novel Fortunata y Jacinta.

Ribbans examines the various stages of composition, not only the earlier, reconstructed Alpha version but also subsequent revisions in the much corrected handwritten text as well as in the printer's galleys. He treats these tentative drafts not in isolation but as part of the process of reaching out toward the coherent definitive text.

Ribbans's analysis of such devices as the ambiguous role of the narrator, the use of free indirect style and direct dialogue, and the construction of distinctive ideolects leads to the heart of his study, the development of Galdos's characters.