To understand the current Galician novel, it is necessary to understand the history and status of the geographical region and its language over the centuries. There is occasionally some confusion as to what constitutes a Galician novel, because of the complex circumstances that led to the creation of the autonomous region today. It is easy to identify a Galician novelist by his or her place of birth, which would be one of the four provinces in the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula: A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense, and Pontevedra. A fair number of novelists from previous centuries would fit this description and many are extremely well known: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Ramón del Valle- Inclán, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Elena Quiroga, and even Camilo José Cela. For our purposes, however, Galician novels are those that are written in the Galician language, even though this narrower criterion excludes some if not all of the work of other famous figures, such as Rosalía de Castro in the nineteenth century and Rafael Dieste in the twentieth.

The Kingdom of Galicia, which originally included part of what is today northern Portugal, was established in 1065, and it has always had ties of one sort or another to its Portuguese-speaking neighbor to the south. The relationship between the two languages and their mutual antipathy to Castilian is important even today. Yet there is still no unanimity about which form of Galician is the ‘correct’ one (an experience which replicates arguments several decades ago about the ‘modalities’ of Catalan), and deliberations about that issue may have implications for the sense of autonomy and independence that a particular writer may feel since, when Galician readers look at a text, they simultaneously tend to enquire about the author's political and cultural intentions. In the thirteenth century, King Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, King of Leon and Castile, wrote important poetic works in Galician-Portuguese and for a time this became the language of literary culture in Iberia. Despite that early prestige, the language fell into disuse in cultured circles for about four centuries. Kept alive in oral traditions and especially in the rural areas (and until very recently Galicia remained predominantly rural), the language finally began to re-emerge in the nineteenth century.

In 1856, intellectuals, students, and workers joined in the Banquete de Conxo, a public gathering (punctuated with poetic toasts) organized to draft a liberal democratic declaration of solidarity with Galician ideals and support for the Galician language. The other date of significance is 17 May 1863, when Rosalía de Castro's Cantares gallegos (Galician Songs) became the first book to appear in modern times in the Galician language. While the author published five books of verse in all, her five novels in Spanish remained virtually unread for years and were afterwards often ignored by scholars because they were not written in the vernacular. For the same reason, the novels by her husband Manuel Murguía, one of the major players in the Rexurdimento or Renaissance spearheaded by his wife's book, tend not be thought of as Galician, either.