“El Matrimonio
de Sylvia” es otra novela de Upton Sinclair. A continuación veremos unos
párrafos del primer capítulo. La vida de una mujer sufrida y llena de
sacrificios es como comienza la novela. Sylvia y la narradora comparan sus
vidas…
“I am telling
the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to tell it without mention of
myself; but it was written in the book of fate that I should be a decisive
factor in her life, and so her story pre-supposes mine. I imagine the
impatience of a reader, who is promised a heroine out of a romantic and
picturesque "society" world, and finds himself beginning with the
autobiography of a farmer's wife on a solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I remember that Sylvia found me
interesting. Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager questions and
her exclamations, I am able to see myself as a heroine of fiction.
I was to Sylvia
a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first
"common" person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the
reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a
soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things
she desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that had
been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her
modern attitude and her common-sense.