Summary of The Doll’s Room
In “The Doll’s Room”, the chaplain Don Joan recounts the lives — and sudden deaths — of Don Toni and his wife and cousin, Maria Antònia, members of a declining Mallorcan aristocratic family living on their remote estate between roughly 1859 and 1890. The novel explores family tensions, Don Toni’s scandalous relationship with his niece Dona Xima — with whom he elopes to Paris — and the gradual collapse of the family’s fortunes, values, and aristocratic way of life. At the centre of the story lies a mysterious chamber in the manor house known as the Doll’s Room, a forbidden place that becomes a recurring motif throughout the novel.
Reasons to read The Doll’s Room
“The Doll’s Room” is regarded as a classic of Catalan literature. Although Villalonga originally wrote the novel in Catalan, it first appeared in a Spanish version under the title “Bearn o La sala de las muñecas” during the Franco era. The novel is largely a psychological portrait of Don Toni, who is a deeply contradictory figure: at once an old-fashioned provincial nobleman and a cosmopolitan libertine, intellectually curious yet conscious that the privileged world to which he belongs is disappearing. The book won the Premi de la Crítica de narrativa catalana in 1962 and is often compared to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” for its depiction of the decline of the southern European aristocracy. Llorenç Villalonga, a Mallorcan psychiatrist and writer, wrote in both Catalan and Spanish. His best-known works include “The Doll’s Room” and “Mort de dama”, another novel set in Mallorca.
Setting: Mallorca (Spain)
Novel set in Spain: The fictional mountain estate of Bearn in Mallorca, likely inspired by the estate of Raixa in Bunyola (Buñola).
Original title: Bearn o La sala de les nines
Year of publication: 1956
Nr of pages: 247
