COLOMA, LUIS. – Celebrated Spanish Jesuit and novelist, born in Jérez de la Frontera on 9 January 1851. He tried various careers before entering the novitiate of the Society on 24 October 1874. After his studies and priestly ordination (1884), he resided, with the title of writer, in the colleges of Orduña and Bilbao, and then in Madrid from 1894 until his death, which occurred on 10 June 1915.
He owed the beginnings of his literary career to the influence of the distinguished narrator Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl di Faber, 1796–1877); the almost filial veneration he retained for her would later find expression in his Recuerdos de Fernán Caballero (Madrid 1910). C.’s narrative talent, together with his satirical and moralizing vein, first manifested itself in short stories, almost all published in the Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús and subsequently collected in his Lecturas recreativas (Bilbao 1887, several reprints). His first book of greater scope, the novel Pequeñeces (1891; Italian translation, Bagattelle, 2 vols., Vicenza 1897; Piccolezze, Milan 1901), in which he scourges the vices of the Madrid aristocracy, unleashed such a storm of applause and impassioned criticism as no other book in Spain had done for several generations; many wished to find, beneath the fiction, a satire of contemporary figures. Fr. C. then turned to a less irritating genre, the historical narrative,
which he treated in a manner entirely his own: taking the facts from the sources, he sought to provide a genuinely historical narrative, in which only the picturesque detail was the product of the art of imagination. Thus came: Retratos de antaño (1895); La reina mártir (there 1902, on Mary Stuart); El marqués de Mora (there 1903); Jeromín (there 1905, on Don Giovanni d’Austria); Fray Francisco (there 1914, on Cardinal Cisneros; the second part is lacking, having been written recently by Fr. A. Risco). Another narrative, the very lively Boy (there 1910), is nevertheless less even in execution than Pequeñeces. Of a very different kind is his work Historia de las sagrada reliquias de s. Francisco de Borja (there 1903). Received into the Spanish Academy of Language on 6 December 1908, Fr. C. on that occasion read the eulogy of the author of Fra' Gerundio, Fr. Isla, with whom he has often been compared.