After the Death of Don Juan

Reason read: Reading 1001, word of the month (After). I have had this book around since 2020. I am not sure why I bought it, perhaps this was an author featured on the Virago group. I've been a little slow in getting to it but now I have and am I ever happy to have read this here and now. Townsend Warner is an English author who had a heart for Spain. She became involved with Spain during the civil war serving in the Red Cross. This story is a spin off from the myth of Don Juan but in the story one can identify many of the concerns of writers during the civil war. The story has a land owner who has peasants working land around his home. The Catholic church also playing a major part as well. And of course the military. The setting is show more "the seventh decade of the eighteenth century Don Juan disappears." Questions for the reader "will the removal of the heir Don Juan release the peasantry from oppression?, are the corruptions of nobility to entrenched? From the back cover--"this wry novel interlaces legend and historical contemplation."

Noted passages;
pg53. "one should never deny to any section of mankind the means of feeling itself more miserable."

pg 86. "On her ears the accustomed words fell dry and sapless as the dead leaves of autumn."

pg246. There should be justice to the poor; for though Death is welcomed to the house of the oppressed and driven from the door of the rich man, yet in the end he knocks on both doors. Neighbor should stand by neighbor."

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I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Set in the 18th century Spain, it starts off with an unlikely event of a seducer being killed by the apparition of the young woman's father, dead in the duel required to avenge the ill-treatment of his daughter. And then things just spiral out of control with travelling to share the news, only to throw the ancestral village into disarray. What the book does highlight is the chasm between the lives of the landowners and those who work on it, and how things can't just stay the same.