The action focuses on Vetusta (capital city of the province, very identifiable with Oviedo), where the protagonist of the work, Ana Ozores, marries the former Regent of the Audience of the city, Víctor Quintanar, a kind but maniac man and a lot older than her Looking sentimentally abandoned, Ana Ozores begins to be courted by the provincial donjuán Álvaro Mesía. To complete the circle, the magisterial canon D. Fermin de Pas (Ana's confessor) also falls in love with the Regent and becomes Messiah's unspeakable rival. A great altarpiece of secondary characters, portrayed by Clarín with merciless irony, completes the human landscape of the novel.
The author uses the city of Vetusta as a symbol of vulgarity, ignorance and self-righteousness. Ana Ozores is a character afflicted with that pathology of the spirit that was known as Bovarism. From another point of view, Ana embodies the tortured ideality that perishes progressively before a hypocritical society. With these forces in tension, the writer built a cruel and inclement allegation of Spanish provincial life, tight to its ruling classes, in times of the fin de secular Restoration.