Translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts

Soledad is the young daughter of Don Brígido Montiel, a ranch-owner based in a remote part of Uruguay, surrounded by mountains and forests. Her father has promised her hand in marriage to his Brazilian business partner, Don Manduca Pintos, the owner of a nearby ranch, who is well advanced in age.

Pablo Luna is a young gaucho living in a delapidated cabin in the forest, close to Montiel’s ranch. He has had several unpleasant encounters with Montiel, who has labelled him as a layabout and a thief. He also has a mysterious relationship with a deranged old woman who has been reduced to living rough in the forest after being summarily dismissed from Manduca’s ranch. He buries her with great ceremony when she is torn to pieces by a pack of wild dogs.

One day Soledad and Pablo meet by chance in the forest and the mutual attraction is immediate. After they are discovered by Montiel who viciously assaults Pablo, all hell breaks loose when the gaucho takes his revenge.

Eduardo Acevedo Díaz, 1851-1924: Brief Biography

Eduardo Acevedo Díaz was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on 20 April 1851. He was a journalist, a novelist and a politician. He died in Buenos Aires on 18 June, 1924.

Journalism and Politics

Acevedo read law at the Greater University of the Republic, interrupting his studies in 1870 to join Timoteo Aparicio’s revolutionary movement against the Colorado government, presided by Lorenzo Batile, which achieved a compromise peace agreement after two years of struggle. He founded The Uruguayan Magazine in 1875 in opposition to the Colorado presidency of Pedro José Varela, and went into exile in Argentina after his involvement in the unsuccessful “Tricolor” revolution. He returned after a few years but his criticism of the new presidnt, Lorenzo Latorre, forced him back into exile.

Returning to Montevideo he founded “El Nacional” newspaper and was appointed as Senator by the Partido Nacional. He participated in the second insurrection of Aparicio Saravia in 1897, and joined the Consejo de Estado in 1898. He undertook various diplomatic assignments in the Americas and Europe between 1904 and 1914.

Literary Career

Acevedo’s first novel, Brenda, was published in 1886. This was followed in 1888 by perhaps his most famous literary work, Ismael, the first part of a tetralogy based on the Uruguayan civil wars betweeen 1808 and 1825. These works established his reputation as the foremost proponent of the historical novel in Uruguayan literature.

Soledad, his eighth novel, was published in Montevideo in 1894. It reflects the other defining element of Acevedo’s writing, Gauchismo, his interest in Uruguayan rural life and nature, which also features strongly in many of his short stories. This telluric novel highlights the tensions between the nomadic gaucho lifestyle and the oppressive hierarchical discipline of the landowning ranchers, creating a gulf which the strong romantic attraction between the two principal characters will find impossible to breach without a violent conflagration. As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, Soledad is considered to be Acevedo’s “masterpiece, [which] had a continuing influence on gaucho novelists in Uruguay and Argentina.” It is astonishing that this seminal work in the Uruguayan literary canon has never previously been published in English.

Soledad was followed by two more novels and several collections of short stories and essays.