Caballero

Caballero, FERNAN, the pen-name of one of the most popular of more recent Spanish writers. She was the daughter of Nikolas Böhl von Faber (1770-1836), a German merchant in Spain, who had married a Spanish wife, and himself made some real contributions to the history of Spanish literature. Born at Morges in Switzerland in 1797, while her parents were travelling, she spent great part of her childhood in Germany, but returned to Spain in 1813, and in her seventeenth year married a merchant named Planell, whom she accompanied to America. A few years later she found herself a widow, and soon after married the Marqués de Arco Hermoso, two years after whose death in 1835 she married an advocate named Arrom, to become a third time a widow in 1863. The sad circumstances of her third husband's death and her profound dissatisfaction with the liberal political movements of the time clouded her later years with gloom. She died at Seville, April 7, 1877. Fernan Caballero was a prolific writer, but none of her fifty cuentos are long. The first was La Gaviota, which appeared in 1849 in the pages of the journal El Heraldo. Others that may be mentioned are Elia, Clemencia, La Familia de Alvareda. Her Cuentos y Poesías populares Andaluces (1859) is important as an early collection of Spanish folk-tales and songs. She herself arranged a collection of her works in 13 vols. (Madrid, 1860-61), but to this must be added the later Colección de Artículos religiosos y morales (Cadiz, 1862); La Mitología contada á los Niños (Barc. 1873); Cuentos, Adivinos, Oraciones y Refranes populares é infantiles (Madrid, 1877); and Cuadros de Costumbres (Valencia, 1878). Fernan Caballero possessed the rare gift of story-telling, and had besides a marvellously deep and sure insight into the simple heart of the peasant of Andalusia. Her old-world and somewhat sentimental catholicism sounded strange to the young Spain even of her own day, but added to the charm her stories had for those who held it unwise to destroy before it could be seen what the world was to gain in exchange for the faith, hope, and charity of the old religion.