Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made CorIn Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain's Barbara Cartland or France's Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.

Tellado's tales of love, and of women's difficult quest for material and emotional wellbeing, clearly gave great pleasure to her millions of readers throughout and beyond the Franco...