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Review on a second read.
When, a while back, I went through a few Spanish and Portuguese 19thC novels, I remember La Regenta as the one I was most involved in, although Fortunata and Jacinta was also everything I want in a big 19thC social-psychological novel. On this second read, no doubt helped by a familiarity even though I'd forgotten the plot, I was shortly saying to myself it might be my favourite 19thC novel in that tradition--if I don't count the more metaphysical side, Moby-Dick and Dostoyevsky.

It's often placed as the third in a trio of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: adulterous women. Both of those I read maybe three times, but with misgivings: Madame Bovary is a shallow twit in herself, and the writing cold; Anna Karenina was much more sympathetic, although that novel celebrates family life too much for me. So in adulterous woman classics, it's La Regenta--Ana Ozores--who works for me, almost without reservations. On my first read, a little thing disappointed me: that Ana comes to despise her early instincts towards writing; but on a second read I don't feel the author is ranged behind society's attacks on Ana 'the bluestocking, the George Sand'. Ana is a sincere person, and I have far more points of connection with her than I did with the other adulterous women. I began to compare the novel instead to Middlemarch, in its view of a town, and even in terms of a rival to Dorothea, with whom I identified all over the place.

La Regenta dares to go places that surprise me. It's erotic as heck. It portrays mental illness, and the fear of mental illness, startlingly well. The abuse Ana is subject to as a child rings true: not sexual abuse, but her behaviour sexualised by adults whose 'care' she is in, and what effects this has on her. The novel earns its controversies on publication.

And it's still... not only fresh, it's still a fantastic experiment. Alas runs with the omniscient point of view of the great age of novels (for a statement on why so, and what omniscience has to do with it, see essays by Iris Murdoch in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature) -- Alas stretches and shapes omniscient into an extraordinary tool. I told myself, you could learn how to write from this single novel--and I wish I had. It's a sheer masterclass, not just on point of view, but on so much of the writer's kit.

I haven't even mentioned the character who was most alive to me on my first read: the canon theologian, the priest who slides into irreligious love. Perhaps I had to be as old as I am to truly see Ana Ozores, because I didn't look much past her on this read. There'll be a third ahead, and I hope a fourth.

--original review--
Marvelous novel, that told me the 19th century novel was alive and kicking in Spain - I had no idea. If you think you've run out of great 19th century novels, oh come here.