Mara
Ioan Slavici
Mara
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Widowed Mara supports her children, Persida and Trică, by trading around the markets and river crossings of nineteenth-century Transylvania. Her fierce thrift and ambition are directed towards their future, but the children grow into desires and relationships that cannot be managed like money in a strongbox.
About the book
Published in book form in 1894, Mara centres on a widowed market trader living near the Mureș River in Transylvania. Practical, energetic and intensely careful with money, Mara works to secure a better future for her two children, Persida and Trică. Their education and advancement become the organising purpose of her life. Ioan Slavici sets the family within a multi-ethnic world of markets, guilds, religious communities and small towns. As Persida and Trică grow older, their own attachments and ambitions complicate Mara’s plans. The novel pays close attention to work, money, family authority and the social boundaries that shape marriage and respectability.
Characters
Mara — Protagonist
A widowed market trader whose hard work and careful saving are devoted to her children’s advancement.
Persida — Mara’s daughter
Mara’s strong-willed daughter, educated at a convent and increasingly determined to choose her own path.
Trică — Mara’s son
Mara’s son, whose apprenticeship and future trade are central to his mother’s plans for the family.
Națl — Hubăr’s son
The butcher Hubăr’s son, whose attraction to Persida crosses family and religious expectations.
Hubăr — Butcher
A prosperous butcher and Națl’s father, concerned with family authority, reputation and his son’s future.
Mother Aegidia — Prioress
The Catholic prioress who takes an interest in Persida’s education and welfare.
Bocioacă — Master craftsman
A prosperous master under whom Trică enters the structured world of apprenticeship and trade.
About the author
Ioan Slavici (1848–1925) was a Romanian writer, journalist and teacher, born in Transylvania when it was still under Austro-Hungarian rule. He is one of the founders of Romanian realist prose: his village stories are about what money does to people who have never had any, told without sentiment about peasant life and without excusing anybody. He was imprisoned more than once for his journalism, in Hungary before the First World War and in Romania after it. His best-known works are the novella Moara cu noroc and the novel Mara.