VIRTUES I Ana Ozores, the protagonist of the novel, seeks to enjoy the authentic during her life.

"The heroic city was napping". With these words Leopoldo Alas -better known as "Clarín", due to his lucid and ironic frankness as a literary critic- begins his most outstanding work: La Regenta. The beginning of what is considered to be the most important novel of Spanish realism could not have had a more traditional beginning. The description with which the writer, then living in Oviedo, opens his novel, shows that certain customs, but also manners, remain unchanged today. In this sense, the story masterfully and sarcastically sets the scene of Spain in the last third of the 19th century. Its protagonist? I would say two: a city, Vetusta, and a woman, Ana Ozores, nicknamed by her neighbors as "la Regenta" because she was the wife of the ex-regent of the Audiencia. There are countless programs of study that relate, and rightly so, the Clarinian protagonist with so many other adulterous nerves of nineteenth-century literature such as Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina or Effi Briest. The resemblance between all these women is undeniable, however, our Ana is unique. Her creator knew it well, because of all of them, she is the only one who survives herself -although it is worth remembering that she does not come out of it with flying colors either-. In any case, where does such compassion come from on the part of her creator, shared, no doubt, by the reader?

Ana's life is marked by deep suffering. Her mother dies in childbirth and she is raised by her two apathetic aunts whose only interest is to make the most of her beauty through the concert of her marriage. After a painful childhood, not without scorn and humiliation, she is married to Don Victor Quintanar, a good man twenty years older than her, who suffers from impotence, and for whom she does not and will not feel any greater affection than that of paternal affection. Constrained by the rigid social conventions of the time, she abandons herself, since her childhood, to piety and letters, which prove to be a soothing balm for her painful soul. In spite of the hostility with which life has been presented to him, he does not resign himself to an anodyne wandering, so that the approach to the divine opens the doors to an authentic life. Life could not be "just that": to grow up, marry and hibernate in the heat of the pomposity of the customs of class. La Regenta has the deep conviction that there is something more good, beautiful and truthful than what she sees around her.

The mediocrity of her environment collides with the authenticity to which she aspires and the possibility of not achieving it torments her. All this leads her to be alone, to be a rare and suspicious specimen in her community; a being who, acting under unknown parameters, makes her uncomfortable. Ridiculed in private by her neighbors, due to her anomalous behavior in subject morals, she lives in exile, having hardly moved from the walls of her house. This is the high price she must pay for living according to the dictates of her conscience. However, these high expectations are, at the same time, his own trap. The interpretation of his recurrent readings as faithful reality, alter his senses, blurring all understanding, so that, despite showing great temperance throughout the novel, it is precisely a purely romantic interpretation of love that leads him to succumb to the vile seductions of the quintessential ladies' man of the city: Don Álvaro Mesía.

The stumble of the most noble and incorruptible vetustense produces a petty rejoicing among some of her neighbors, confirming their short-sightedness, because they ignore that the fall is part of the path of those who choose to enter through the narrow door; so often uncomfortable and lonely, but at the same time, deeply comforting and entrenched. The truth, on so many occasions, alone, ridiculed and combative, does not lose its condition due to such circumstances. Thus, Leopoldo Alas, who knows the hiding places of the soul of his heroine, sympathizes and does not give her the tragic end that, however, his counterparts give to their respective protagonists, since, hopeful, passionate and in a persevering search, the Regenta lives in spite of her clumsiness and disordered sensibility. And if something defines us as humans, it is that in all of us there is an "in spite of", that is, a congenital fragility that paradoxically questions the existence of something or Someone greater and more perfect. This question, eluded by many and seriously raised by few, is capable of signifying existence. This is the reason why Ana, ours, is unique, since her noble and kind heart leaves a gap to the mystery of what is socially considered unimportant, trying throughout her life to find and enjoy the greatness of the authentic.