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 of Jesus on 24 October 1874. After completing his studies and priestly ordination (1884), he resided with the title of writer in the colleges of Orduña and Bilbao, then in Madrid from 1894 until his death, which occurred on 10 June 1915.
He owed the beginning of his literary career to the influence of the distinguished writer Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, 1796–1877); the almost filial veneration he held for her would later be expressed in his *Recuerdos de Fernán Caballero* (Madrid 1910). Coloma’s narrative talent, combined with his satirical and moralizing vein, first manifested itself in short stories, almost all published in *El Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús* and later collected in his *Lecturas recreativas* (Bilbao 1887, with multiple reprints). His first major work, the novel *Pequeñeces* (1891; II. trans. *Bagattelle*, 2 vols., Vicenza 1897; *Piccolezze*, Milan 1901), which castigates the vices of Madrid’s aristocracy, provoked such a storm of applause and passionate criticism as no other book in Spain had done for generations; many sought to detect in its satire portraits of contemporary figures. Father Coloma then turned to a less inflammatory genre, historical fiction, which he treated in his own distinctive manner: drawing his facts from sources, he aimed to produce a truly historical narrative, in which only the picturesque details were the product of imaginative art. Among his works in this vein are: *Retratos de antaño* (1895); *La reina mártir* (1895, on Mary Stuart); *El marqués de Mora* (1903); *Jeromín* (1905, on Don John of Austria); *Fray Francisco* (1914, on Cardinal Cisneros; the second part, recently written by Father A. Risco, is missing). Another lively but less evenly crafted work is *Boy* (1910). Of a quite different kind is his *Historia de las sagradas reliquias de S. Francisco de Borja* (1903).
Admitted to the Spanish Academy on 6 December 1908, Father Coloma delivered on that occasion a eulogy of the author of *Fra’ Gerundio*, Father Isla, with whom he has often been compared.