In three of her tales—"El encaje roto"( 1897), "Champagne("1898), and "La boda"( 1909), Pardo Bazán presents her readers with a bride on her wedding day; in each case, and each in her own way, the bride breaks with convention and time-honored tradition on this most anticipated day of her life, only to see her life irrevocably altered—not by the marriage—but by her own actions and decisions. The juxtaposition of these three tales with a fourth later one, "La punta del cigarro" (1914), the story of a man in search of a wife wherein a male narrator delineates nineteenth-century society's requirements for the ideal wife, illustrates Doña Emilia's astute subversion of the traditional feminine ideal and her empowerment of female protagonists.