The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Summary

The Bridge of San Luis Rey begins with a catastrophe: at noon on Friday, July 20, 1714, an old rope bridge woven by the Incas on the road between Lima and Cuzco in Spanish Peru breaks, and five travelers fall to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar who sees the accident, resolves to prove by investigation that the deaths were part of God's design, and he spends six years gathering facts about the lives of the five victims. The middle sections tell their stories. The Marquesa de Montemayor, Doña María, an awkward and lonely noblewoman, writes brilliant letters to her cold daughter in Spain, letters later admired as classics of Spanish literature. Through her young companion Pepita, an orphan raised by the abbess Madre María del Pilar, she comes to see the selfishness of her love and resolves to live with courage, two days before she dies on the bridge with Pepita. Esteban and Manuel are twin foundlings raised by the abbess, so close that they share a private language. When Manuel falls in love with the actress Camila Perichole, the bond strains; Manuel dies of an infected wound, and Esteban, desolate, attempts suicide before agreeing to sail with the sea captain Alvarado. He dies on the bridge on his way. Uncle Pio, a gifted adventurer who discovered the Perichole as a girl singing in cafés and made her the greatest actress in Peru, devotes his life to her. After smallpox scars her and she withdraws from the world, he persuades her to let him take her sickly son, Don Jaime, to be educated in Lima. Both fall from the bridge. In the final part, Brother Juniper's book is judged heretical, and he and it are burned in the public square. The survivors, the abbess, the Perichole and the Marquesa's daughter, meet and find consolation in one another and in the abbess's work for the sick. The book ends with the abbess's reflection that love is the bridge between the living and the dead. Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1928. It was a best seller in a decade of disillusion, and its question, whether suffering has meaning, has kept it in print and in classrooms ever since.

Top Lessons

• Can suffering be explained?

  Brother Juniper tries to prove God's purpose with evidence and fails; the novel leaves the question open while suggesting that love, rather than explanation, answers it. Students can discuss the limits of reasoning about providence.

• Imperfect love

  Each victim loves someone imperfectly, possessively, jealously or without return. The novel treats these flawed loves with sympathy and shows some characters growing beyond them.

• The living and the dead

  The survivors meet and are reconciled, and the abbess concludes that love links the living and the dead. Wilder offers consolation without certainty.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Manuel's death from an infected wound, Esteban's suicidal grief, and the Perichole's smallpox show the medical realities of eighteenth-century Lima and the psychology of mourning.

• Part Three

  Esteban's grief after his twin's death and his suicide attempt.