COLOMA, LUIS. - Celebrated Spanish Jesuit and novelist, b. at Jérez de la Frontera on 9 Jan. 1851. He attempted various careers before entering the novitiate of the Society on 24 Oct. 1874. After 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 his start in his literary career to the influence of the distinguished novelist Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber, 1796-1877); the almost filial veneration he preserved for her would later be expressed in his Recuerdos de Fernán Caballero (Madrid 1910). C.'s narrative talent, together with his satirical and moralizing vein, manifested itself first in short stories, almost all published in the Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús and later collected in his Lecturas recreativas (Bilbao 1887, various reprints). His first book of broader scope, the novel Pequeñeces (1891; Italian tr., Bagattelle, 2 vols., Vicenza 1897; Piccolezze, Milan 1901), in which he lashes the vices of the Madrid aristocracy, unleashed such a storm of applause and passionate criticism as no other book in Spain for several generations; many sought to find beneath the fiction the satire of contemporary figures. Fr. C. then turned to a less irritating genre, the historical tale, which he treated in a manner all his own: taking the facts from the sources, he seeks to give a truly historical narrative, in which only the picturesque detail is the fruit of the art of imagination. Thus came: Retratos de antaño (1895); La reina mártir (ibid. 1902, on Mary Stuart); El marqués de Mora (ibid. 1903); Jeromín (ibid. 1905, on Don John of Austria); Fray Francisco (ibid. 1914, on Card. Cisneros; the second part is missing, which was written recently by Fr. A. Risco). Another tale, very lively, Boy (ibid. 1910), is however of less even workmanship than Pequeñeces. Of a quite different genre is his writing: Historia de las sagradas reliquias de s. Francisco de Borja (ibid. 1903). Having been received on 6 Dec. 1908 into the Spanish Academy of the Language, Fr. C. read on that occasion the eulogy of the author of Fra' Gerundio, Fr. Isla, to whom he has often been compared.
Bibliography3 works
Edmondo Lamalle