Frances Erskine Inglis Calderón de la Barca

Edinburgh, about 1804 - 1882, Madrid

BiographyCalderón de la Barca, Frances Erskine Inglis [Fanny] (1804–1882), author, was born in Edinburgh on 23 December 1804, the fifth of the ten children of William Inglis, a writer to the signet, of Queen Street and Middleton Hall, and his wife, Jane, the daughter of James Stein of Kilbogie, a distiller. Her father was prominent in Edinburgh society, but his speculations bankrupted him in 1828. He took refuge in Normandy, with his family, and died at Le Havre in 1830. His daughter Frances, whose thorough education had included sojourns abroad, first took to writing in these straitened circumstances, and produced the novels Gertrude: a Tale of the Sixteenth Century (2 vols., 1830) and The Affianced One (3 vols., 1832). After her father's death the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and the widow opened a school for young ladies. On 24 September 1838 Fanny, as Frances was known, married Angel Calderón de la Barca (1790–1861), since 1835 Spanish minister to the United States. Though the bearer of a famous name, her husband was not rich, and depended on his career as a diplomat and politician of the moderado liberal tendency. He was born in Buenos Aires. It is possible that the couple met through their friendship with the Boston historian and Hispanist William Hickling Prescott. The marriage was childless but clearly affectionate.

In 1839 Calderón de la Barca was named first Spanish minister to independent Mexico. Fanny's journal in Mexico, published as a series of letters dated 27 October 1839 to 27 February 1842, appeared at the end of that year as Life in Mexico, during a Residence of Two Years in that Country, the work by which she is principally remembered and which remains the best-known foreigner's description of early republican Mexico. Published with the support of Prescott, who enlisted the help of Charles Dickens for the English edition, it was in general well received by Anglo-Saxon readers, though one reviewer doubted that it was genuine. It did not please many Mexicans; they with justice likened the author to Frances Trollope, whose Domestic Manners of the Americans had appeared in 1832.

Life in Mexico is a somewhat relentlessly picturesque account of Mexican scenes, society, and politics, which may explain that one reviewer's reservations about its authenticity; Fanny Calderón's strong visual sense gives a record that is the literary equivalent of that left by the contemporary Romantic artists who visited Mexico, such as Carl Nebel and Johann Moritz Rugendas. None the less it contains penetrating sketches of many of the principal figures of the time, Santa Anna, Bustamante, Victoria, Alamán, and many others, of the society of Mexico City, particularly its religious institutions and observances and the situation of women, and records a number of excursions to the provinces. Both Fanny Calderón and her husband were assiduous providers of documentation and information to Prescott; her descriptions of Mexican scenery served him in writing his Conquest of Mexico, which appeared in 1843.

Prefaced by Prescott, Life in Mexico was given the form of letters, presumably written to him, but, as is established in the 1966 edition by Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher, it was in reality based extensively on the author's journal, of which two out of the original three manuscript volumes survive (priv. coll.), containing many expurgated passages. The complete text is not only more critical of many aspects of Mexican life—filth, insects, corruption, ignorance, bombast, ‘horrid Mexican fruit’—but is also more penetrating, understanding, and affectionate. The restored parts show a capacity for reflection not so apparent in the other editions, which merely reprint the text of 1842.

From Mexico the Calderóns returned to Europe via Cuba and Boston. Calderón, an amiable and effective diplomat, was once again named envoy to Washington in 1844, an appointment both welcomed. In 1853 he became foreign minister in the brief and disastrous administration of the Conde de San Luis, which in July 1854 was overthrown by Espartero and O'Donnell. This brought to an end a decade of moderado rule amid scenes of violence in the capital. Calderón had to leave Spain in disguise, and Fanny followed him to Paris. In 1856 she published both her translation of D. Bartoli's History of the Life and Institute of St Ignatius Loyola—she had become a Roman Catholic in 1847—and also anonymously The Attaché in Madrid, or, Sketches of the Court of Isabella II, her version of the pronunciamiento of 1854. Though it does not rival her Mexican work, it is lively and level-headed, despite being a courtier's book.

The Calderóns returned to Spain in 1856. On the death of her husband in 1861, Fanny retired to a convent, but was promptly appointed governess to the Infanta Isabella. She was made a marquesa in her own right by the restored Alfonso XII in 1876, and died in the royal palace in Madrid on 6 February 1882.

Malcolm Deas
Sources Life in Mexico: the letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, ed. H. T. Fisher and M. H. Fisher (1966) · The correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833–1847, ed. R. Wolcott (1925) · Prescott: unpublished letters to Gayangos in the library of the Hispanic Society of America, ed. C. L. Penney (1927) · F. Calderón de la Barca, La vida en Mexico, ed. F. Teixidor, 2 vols. (1959)
Archives priv. coll. :: Hispanic Society of America Library, New York, Gayangos MSS · Mass. Hist. Soc., Prescott MSS
Likenesses photograph (after oil painting), repro. in Fisher and Fisher, eds., Life in Mexico

Source: Malcolm Deas, ‘Calderón de la Barca, Frances Erskine Inglis (1804–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45786, accessed 17 July 2013]

LC name authority rec. n79114023
LC Heading: Calderón de la Barca, Madame (Frances Erskine Inglis), 1804?-1882

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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