María by Jorge Isaacs: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

Efraín tells the story as a book of memories. After six years of school in Bogotá, he comes home at the end of August to his family’s house in the hills above the Cauca Valley. Waiting there is María, the daughter of Salomón, a cousin of his father’s who lived in Jamaica: her name was Ester, she arrived at the age of three, after Salomón lost his wife, and grew up with Efraín. Now she is a young woman, and every morning she puts flowers in his room.

Love grows through flowers, glances and lessons: Efraín teaches geography to María and his sister Emma, and reads them Chateaubriand’s Atala, which makes them weep. But María has a fit, and his father says it is the same illness that killed her mother young. Dr. Mayn fears epilepsy; Efraín’s father asks him to be more reserved with her and reminds him that he must go to Europe to study medicine. Meanwhile Carlos, Efraín’s old school friend, asks through his father for María’s hand.

Around the idyll runs the life of the hacienda and the mountains: the family of José, a settler from Antioquia, a tiger hunt, Tránsito and Braulio’s wedding. One of the finest episodes is the story of Feliciana, María’s nurse, whose name was Nay and who was brought from Africa as a slave. Meanwhile a financial loss makes Efraín’s father ill, and the day of departure draws near.

María is a Romantic, sentimental novel: told in the first person like a memoir and named after its heroine, it tells of a pure love threatened by illness and distance. It echoes Atala, which the characters themselves read, and what was new was setting the idyll in real American nature: the rivers, forests and birds of the Cauca Valley, described in carefully crafted prose. It is also a novel of local customs, recording the speech, music and ways of the region.

It is still read for the force of its lyricism (“¡María! ¡María! ¡Cuánto te amé! ¡Cuánto te amara!…”, “María! María! How I loved you! How I would have loved you!…”) and for its portrait of a world. Much of it is autobiographical: Isaacs was from Cali and his family owned the El Paraíso hacienda, now a museum. It also shows a slave-holding society, in which Efraín’s father treats his slaves kindly “without ceasing to be their master,” while Nay’s story tells of the African slave trade through one of its victims.

Jorge Isaacs was born in Cali on 1 April 1837 and died in Ibagué on 17 April 1895. The son of a Jamaican of English and Jewish descent, he published his Poems in 1864, and that same year, while supervising work on the road between Buenaventura and Cali, he began writing María, his only novel.

On that road he caught the malaria that would eventually kill him. He fought in Colombia’s civil wars, sat in Congress and served as consul general in Chile; María made him one of the great names of Spanish-language Romanticism.