The quality that gives imperishable value to Fernán’s work is its truth: the scenes are at once felt to be real, the characters are living. She reproduces the lively mirth and malicious wit of the _andaluz_ peasant, the gay laughter-loving nature of the Sevillians, with their keen perception of the false and the ridiculous. She describes a Seville _patio_ (in “Elia”), or a bull-fight (in “La Gaviota”), or a country house, _quinta_ (in “Clemencia”), or a deserted convent (in “La Gaviota”) with a delicate minuteness of detail that brings them vividly before us. Writing of simple, everyday events, as in the preface she characterizes those of “Elia,” she paints them with unsurpassed clearness and vigour, and much of the piquancy and charm, the _sal y pimienta_, of the South is in her pages. There are in her works some scenes that in sobriety and psychological skill are worthy of Stendhal. Her characters are drawn from life with the sure and penetrating analysis of genius. Perhaps the best example of all is the character of Marisalada in “La Gaviota,” but the slighter figures, the conservative General Santa María and the bull-fighter Pepe Vera, in the same novel, the vivacious, charitable Asistenta in “Elia” (having much in common with Fernán’s own character), who is unmoved by the discovery of a Roman epitaph on one of her farms and refuses to believe that there is a land where bishops marry, Marcial and Jenaro in “Lágrimas”--all these and many more are sketched with masterly skill. It is when they treat of country scenes and peasant life that the novels of Fernán Caballero are at their best, as the first half of “La Gaviota” in the village of Villamar, or a part of “Clemencia” (1852) in the village of Villa-María. The character of Don Martín of Villa-María and the scene of his interview with the importunate Tía Latrana are thoroughly in the manner of Pereda. So, too, is the wife of the village mayor in “Lágrimas.” “Haber gastadu mis cuartus” she exclaims--and the use of dialect, so freely employed by Pereda, is noticeable--“en facere de esse fillu meu un hulgazán! Non me lo dejú para esu mi tíu Bartulumé, es verdad.” The foreigners at Seville are portrayed with less sympathy; so we have Sir John Burnwood, who has come to Seville in order to ride up the Giralda, and, finding this impossible, proposes to buy the Alcázar, or Sir George Percy, who is admitted to have noble qualities, but allowed to show unmistakably bad taste.