Fanny Calderón de la Barca
Fanny Calderón de la Barca, born Frances Erskine Inglis in Scotland, was a prominent 19th-century writer known for her insightful observations of Mexican society during her time as the wife of the Spanish minister to the United States. After her family faced financial difficulties and moved to the U.S., Fanny helped establish a school for girls in Boston, which ultimately closed due to controversy. In 1839, she accompanied her husband, Angel Calderón, to Mexico, where she began writing a series of letters that would later be published as *Life in Mexico*. This work, released in 1843, is celebrated for its detailed portrayal of Mexican life, politics, and culture during a time of significant upheaval, offering a unique perspective from a diplomat's wife. Fanny's letters not only illuminate social and racial dynamics but also provide intimate glimpses into everyday life, challenging stereotypes of the era. She continued her literary endeavors even after her husband's death, earning recognition for her contributions to literature and history. Fanny Calderón de la Barca remains an important figure in the study of travel writing and women's narratives in the Americas.
Fanny Calderón de la Barca
Scottish American travel writer
- Born: December 23, 1804
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died: February 3, 1882
- Place of death: Madrid, Spain
As the wife of Angel Calderón de la Barca, Spain’s first diplomat to Mexico after Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Fanny was in a unique position to observe a New World nation in the making. Her book Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country is considered the best book of the period on Mexico written by a foreigner.
Early Life
Fanny Calderón de la Barca (cahl-deh-RON dee lah BAHR-kah) was born Frances Erskine Inglis (ihn-GALS) and was the fifth child of William Inglis and Jane Stein, who also had four sons and five other daughters. The well-born William Inglis was a Writer to the Signet, a special branch of the legal profession in Scotland. In 1828, when Fanny was twenty-four, the family moved to Normandy after her father was forced to declare bankruptcy. He died two years later and Fanny moved to Boston with her widowed mother, three of her sisters, and several nieces.
In Boston, Fanny and her family founded a school for girls. Though initially successful, the school foundered after the publication of an anonymous pamphlet satirizing prominent Bostonians that purportedly had been written by Fanny and a male admirer. Angry parents withdrew their children from the school and its enrollment fell. In 1835, the family moved again, to Staten Island, New York, where Fanny met her future husband, Angel Calderón de la Barca. He had been born in 1790 in Argentina when it was still a colony of Spain. He had been educated in Spain in science and entered the field of diplomacy. When he married Fanny on September 24, 1838, he was serving as Spanish minister to the United States during the administration of President Martin Van Buren. In October, 1839, the Calderóns sailed for Mexico, where Angel became Spain’s first emissary to the former colony that had gained independence in 1821.
Life’s Work
Fanny Calderón’s fame comes from the book that she published based on letters that she wrote home to family and friends while living in Mexico as the wife of the Spanish envoy. Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country appeared in nearly simultaneous British and American editions in 1843. She wrote her first letter on October 27, 1839, the same day that she sailed for Mexico with her husband. The last of her fifty-four letters is dated April 28, 1842. She wrote the letters without any thought of their later publication. It was only at the later urging of the noted historian William Hickling Prescott that she decided to publish the letters. Prescott, in turn, took full advantage of Fanny’s sojourn in Mexico, availing himself of both the information gleaned from her letters and the couple’s research on his behalf. Prescott published History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843, one of the two major works on which his renown rests, without ever having visted Mexico. Four years later, he published History of the Conquest of Peru .
Fanny’s book was well received in the United States. In Mexico, the Siglo Diez y Nueve newspaper planned to translate and serialize the entire volume. Four letters appeared in that newspaper in April and May of 1843. The fourth letter complained about pestilential conditions of the port city of Veracruz, offending some readers. The fifth letter would have dealt with General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was the dictatorial president of Mexico at the time, but the newspaper did not publish any further letters. It was not until 1920 that the first Spanish-language edition of the book appeared.
A principal concern with Fanny’s letters at the time of their publication was diplomatic. Some people feared that her husband had helped her in some way, and that her letters might, therefore, reveal secrets of the Mexican state. However, it was precisely because of her husband’s political position that Fanny published Life in Mexico under the name “Mme. C—— De La B——.” For similar reasons, she also used few names of real persons in her published letters. Instead, she typically substituted initial letters and dashes for names, such as “Señor A——.” A massive new edition published in 1966 filled in such missing information.
Fanny was in Mexico at a time of intense political activity and change during which she witnessed two minor revolutions, a change of president, and a copper monetary crisis. She also traveled by stagecoach and horseback and experienced the fear of the nearly ubiquitous highway robbers. Her letters report on social and racial categories and on the wealthy and the poor. At the same time, her status as a diplomat’s wife gave her entry to areas normally forbidden to outsiders, such as convents into which no outsider, foreign or native, was to enter and from which no insider, or nun, was ever to leave. Consequently her text reveals aspects of Mexico completely unknown to her audience.
After leaving Mexico, Fanny spent time in Scotland and Madrid, Spain, followed by nine years in Washington, where her husband was Spain’s representative to the United States. They then returned to Madrid, where her husband was to be minister of foreign affairs. However, new political turmoil led to their exile from Spain from 1854 to 1856.
Fanny is believed to have written the anonymous The Attaché in Madrid: Or, Sketches of the Court of Isabella II (1856), purportedly a translation of the memoirs of a German diplomat to the Spanish court during the same period. After Angel died in 1861, Fanny stayed on as governess to the Princess Isabel. In 1876, she was rewarded with the title of marquesa de Calderón de la Barca for the long services of her and her husband to the crown. In early 1882, she died unexpectedly at the age of seventy-seven, probably from pneumonia.
Significance
Life in Mexico remains in print and is still considered a rich source of information about the period of Mexican history that it covers. Fanny’s portrait of Mexico is wide-ranging, from the broader political, historical, and social to the more intimate, the family, women’s dress, gender customs, and behavior. The breadth and depth of detail undoes many stereotypes of the time.
With a rise of interest in travel writing and travel narratives in the late twentieth century, Fanny Calderón’s work has again come under study. Recent research is mining the book for its contribution to social history and issues of gender in particular. Life in Mexico is one of the most important travel narratives by women of the period, and particularly by an American woman in a country of the Americas. As William Hickling Prescott said in his preface to the original edition, Life in Mexico contains “rich stores of instruction and amusement.”
Bibliography
Calderón de la Barca, Fanny. Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, with New Material from the Author’s Private Journals. Edited and annotated by Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966. Using different typefaces to indicate original sources, the editors weave together the previously published text of Life in Mexico with correlating material from Fanny Calderón’s journals. They also insert names where the original published text contained dashes. The edition is generously illustrated with drawings and photos of the period, and extensively annotated, providing a context not normally available to the modern reader. The introduction and short essay on “First Appearance of Life in Mexico; Early Comments; Subsequent History” complement the text. Bibliography.
Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia. “’The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes’: Seclusion and Society in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Postcolonial Mexico.” In Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, edited by Rita S. Kranidis. New York: Twayne, 1998. An investigation of Calderón’s views on nature, nation, race, and gender in writing during a period in which colonial perspectives were almost inevitable.
Ledford-Miller, Linda. “A Protestant Critique of Catholicism: Frances Calderón de la Barca in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” In Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, edited by Kristi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Analysis of the Protestant Calderón’s often horrified reaction to Roman Catholic practices that she observed in Mexico, though ironically she herself converted to Catholicism several years later.
Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. “’The Cannon Are Roaring’: Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico as Gendered History.” In Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, edited by Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1998. Discussion of Calderón’s description and analysis of the series of revolutions and counterrevolutions during her two-year stay in Mexico.