Carolina Coronado

Spanish poet

• Born: December 12, 1820
• Birthplace: Almendralejo, Spain
• Died: January 15, 1911
• Place of death: Lisbon, Portugal

Three themes characterized the life of Carolina Coronado: politics, iconoclastic behavior, and literature. She was a popular Spanish writer, especially of Romantic poetry, and was prominent in social and diplomatic circles for her literary pursuits, reformist activities, and diplomatic interventions.

Early Life

Carolina Coronado (kah-roh-LEE-nah koh-roh-NAH-doh) was the granddaughter of Fermín Coronado, a political opponent of Spain’s King Fernando VII, who was secretly assassinated in the king’s prison. When she was a child, her father, Nicolás Coronado, was also imprisoned and his property seized. Her mother, María Antonia Romero de Coronado, then moved the family to Badajoz so she could visit Carolina’s father in prison and take him food.

Coronado received the domestic education considered appropriate for a young woman of early nineteenth century Spain that focused on how to run a home and entertain socially. She rebelled and educated herself through extensive reading, secretly by night. She started her writing career by composing by memory at night and wrote her first poem at the age of ten. Because social mores of the time held that formal education of young women fostered immorality, Coronado suffered social ostracism when her literary pursuits became known. Her mother forbade her to continue in order to protect her reputation, but her male friends and family members helped her to continue.

In her first public political gesture, Coronado embroidered a banner for a liberal anti-Carlista battalion. Shortly before she turned nineteen, she published her first poem, “A la palma,” in the November 22, 1839, issue of El Piloto, a Madrid magazine. The poem attracted the attention of famous Spanish literary figures, such as José de Espronceda, who dedicated a poem to her. She also started a correspondence with Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, who wrote the prologue to her first published collection of poetry in 1843.

Life’s Work

Coronado’s reputation was boosted by a macabre incident when the daily Madrid newspaper El Mundo falsely reported her death on January 10, 1844. Although she suffered her whole life from what were described as catatonic attacks, the young Coronado remained very much alive. Meanwhile, the publicity from the premature obituary fed public opinion, and Coronado began to give academic presentations, do charitable works, explicate art, and collaborate on literary magazines. Her works were published in magazines and then reprinted in newspapers.

Already the darling of a public entranced by the Romantic movement, Coronado seemed to be a classic suffering beauty who pursued an unrequited or impossible but obsessive love of a mysterious young man known only as Alberto. From the age of seventeen, Coronado dedicated poems to Alberto; however, he left Badajoz and died in Seville in May of 1847—an event about which she wrote yet another poem. Afterward, a story arose that she declared perpetual chastity in the cathedral in Seville as a result of her grief. Whether this was true or a merely a romantic myth is unknown; however, it is well established that she suffered a paralytic illness in Cadiz and her family moved near Madrid on her physicians’ recommendation.

The press followed Coronado everywhere, and famous writers lionized her. On September 27, 1848, she was honored in a special session at the Liceo de Madrid along with the Cuban-born poet Gertrudis Avellaneda. Even Queen Mother Cristina and her daughter, Queen Isabel II, admired Coronado. However, it took four years for Coronado to establish herself at the royal court. During that time she wrote the poems for a second book and traveled to Madrid, the province of Andalucía, France, and England. She wrote about French novelist Victor Hugo and his wife, who responded by offering to go with Coronado to London. She was courted by the well-known Spanish intellectuals Juan Donoso Cortés and Francisco Martínez de La Rosa.

In early 1852, Coronado met Horatio Justus Perry, secretary of the U.S. embassy at Madrid. Perry had something of a reputation himself because of his affairs with various Spanish girls, but he had vowed to marry a Protestant. He was planning to return to the United States to begin a political career and take care of his two orphaned sisters and reportedly intended to have a last fling with Coronado. However, after she convinced him that she would die without him, they went to Gibraltar together in March, 1852, unsuccessfully seeking dispensation to marry in a Roman Catholic ceremony. They did marry in a Protestant ceremony in April but were granted the desired dispensation and married again in a Roman Catholic mass in July at the Spanish embassy in Paris. Coronado published her second book during the same year and gave birth to a daughter during the following January.

After marrying Perry, Coronado embraced the role of diplomatic wife. She became known for literary salons, a social convention she had earlier rejected. Although she was writing less, William C. Bryant took her work to the United States and supported the Perrys’ continued residence in Madrid as a buffer to a conflict between the United States and Spain that was developing over the status of Cuba. Coronado herself averted open conflict at the last minute in that crisis by involving the British ambassador. As a result, Perry lost his job, as some in the United States saw that intervention as a betrayal. Soon after, the couple lost their second child, Horacio, and Perry started a transatlantic telegraph company with the inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. Meanwhile, their third child, Matilde, was born in 1857.

Coronado wrote to President Abraham Lincoln about Perry’s situation, and he was restored to the position of secretary of the embassy. Coronado began to lobby for various political criminals with Queen Isabel and the government. She physically protected soldiers involved in the San Gil military insurrection of 1866 in the U.S. embassy and arranged their escape when the American ambassador, John P. Hale, refused to allow fugitives in the embassy. Coronado also took an active part in the demonstrations during the Spanish Revolution of 1868 . An avowed abolitionist, she touted Lincoln publicly for his role in freeing American slaves. In 1863, she congratulated the Catalán abolitionist movement, and in 1868 she and the Spanish feminist and writer Concepción Arenal became president and vice president of the Madrid Abolitionist Association, about which she wrote a poem.

Coronado’s older daughter died of measles in June, 1873, while her husband was in London on business for his telegraph company. Described as crazy with grief, she had her daughter embalmed, dressed up, and placed in the sacristy of the Convent of the Nuns of Pascualas de Recoletos. Her mind was never the same afterward.

The Perrys moved to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, where Coronado alternated between holding literary salons in the Bessone and Mitra palaces in Paco d’Arcos and Poco do Bispo. Perry’s business failed in 1885 after years of fighting lawsuits in English courts, leaving the Perrys broke. Around this same time, Coronado refused a literary tribute offered by the citizens of her hometown of Badajoz. Financial pressure, Coronado’s mental problems, and political dishonor so plagued Perry that he began composing his memoirs about the United States but died on January 15, 1891, before they were finished. Coronado persuaded the archbishop of Lisbon and the governments of Spain, the United States, and Portugal to embalm him and place his cadaver in Mitra palace until a state funeral could be arranged.

The family’s financial troubles continued, but Coronado’s daughter Matilde helped support the family by doing translations, and they got some assistance from other relatives. Meanwhile, Coronado continued sponsoring salons. She died in Lisbon in January, 1911, and her body was taken to Badajoz—a fact that has caused confusion in some sources about when and where she died.

Significance

Coronado’s principal works include two books of poetry, five dramas, eight novels, and at least two essays. Her poetry has been translated into English and German. She remains a well-known figure in Spain, and numerous works about her are available in Spanish. She is remembered particularly for her feminist poetry and for her work for social reform of civil rights, especially for women and slaves.

Bibliography

Galerstein, Carolyn L., ed. Women Writers of Spain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. A brief chapter on Coronado provides a minimal overview of Coronado’s life and synopses of four of her novels and two collections of her poetry.

Hara, F. “Lamartine’s Influence in the Poems of Carolina Coronado.” Crítica Hispánica 16 (1994): 297-306. This article compares the sentimental and religious content in works by the French writer of the Romantic school Alphonse de Lamartine and his younger contemporary, Coronado, noting similarities in their work.

Kaminsky, Amy Katz. “The Construction of Immortality: Sappho, Saint Theresa, and Carolina Coronado.” Letras Femeninas 19 (1993): 1-13. Feminist critic Kaminsky traces the content and form that the three poets, widely distanced in time, share.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Water Lilies. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. An anthology of five centuries of Spanish women’s writing, the text includes selections by Coronado and critical commentaries of her work.