After the tragic death of her third husband, in 1859, Fernán Caballero was firmly resolved to enter a convent, but her friends did their utmost to dissuade her, and she believed, moreover, that the only books she would be allowed to read would be those of devotion. Finally she gave up this idea, and lived for nearly ten years in one of the houses of the _Patio de las Banderas_ in the Seville Alcázar, granted to her by Queen Isabel II. It would be difficult to imagine a more pleasant home for a writer. On one side the beautiful gardens of the Alcázar, with their myrtles, palms, and oranges, clipped box-hedges, and white marble fountains; on the other the _Plaza del Triunfo_, planted with orange-trees, acacias and palms, and the Cathedral and wonderful Giralda tower. The Revolution of 1868 came to destroy this peace. The Alcázar became for the time the property of the nation, and Fernán Caballero was driven to seek a home elsewhere. She was for other reasons, as a devout Roman Catholic and Royalist, deeply distressed by the Revolution and its sacrilegious results in Seville. The pettiness of many revolutionary measures was shown by the fact that the night-watchmen--the _serenos_--of Seville were forbidden, in calling out the hours, to use the traditional preface “Ave María Purísima.” Fernán Caballero obtained the reversal of this decree. She lived to listen with tears of joy to the bells of the Giralda, as they rang out the news of the Restoration and the beginning of Alfonso XII.’s reign. She was then living in the curving, silent bye-steet that now bears her name. No. 14 is distinguished from the other houses by having, besides the _patio_, a garden with a large lemon-tree, and other shrubs. Here she died in the spring of 1877, in her eighty-first year. The Queen came to visit her here, and a memorial tablet was placed above the entrance of the house by her friends the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier.
The quality that gives imperishable value to Fernán’s work is its truth: the scenes are at once felt to be real, the characters are living. She reproduces the lively mirth and malicious wit of the _andaluz_ peasant, the gay laughter-loving nature of the Sevillians, with their keen perception of the false and the ridiculous. She describes a Seville _patio_ (in “Elia”), or a bull-fight (in “La Gaviota”), or a country house, _quinta_ (in “Clemencia”), or a deserted convent (in “La Gaviota”) with a delicate minuteness of detail that brings them vividly before us. Writing of simple, everyday events, as in the preface she characterizes those of “Elia,” she paints them with unsurpassed clearness and vigour, and much of the piquancy and charm, the _sal y pimienta_, of the South is in her pages. There are in her works some scenes that in sobriety and psychological skill are worthy of Stendhal. Her characters are drawn from life with the sure and penetrating analysis of genius. Perhaps the best example of all is the character of Marisalada in “La Gaviota,” but the slighter figures, the conservative General Santa María and the bull-fighter Pepe Vera, in the same novel, the vivacious, charitable Asistenta in “Elia” (having much in common with Fernán’s own character), who is unmoved by the discovery of a Roman epitaph on one of her farms and refuses to believe that there is a land where bishops marry, Marcial and Jenaro in “Lágrimas”--all these and many more are sketched with masterly skill. It is when they treat of country scenes and peasant life that the novels of Fernán Caballero are at their best, as the first half of “La Gaviota” in the village of Villamar, or a part of “Clemencia” (1852) in the village of Villa-María. The character of Don Martín of Villa-María and the scene of his interview with the importunate Tía Latrana are thoroughly in the manner of Pereda. So, too, is the wife of the village mayor in “Lágrimas.” “Haber gastadu mis cuartus” she exclaims--and the use of dialect, so freely employed by Pereda, is noticeable--“en facere de esse fillu meu un hulgazán! Non me lo dejú para esu mi tíu Bartulumé, es verdad.” The foreigners at Seville are portrayed with less sympathy; so we have Sir John Burnwood, who has come to Seville in order to ride up the Giralda, and, finding this impossible, proposes to buy the Alcázar, or Sir George Percy, who is admitted to have noble qualities, but allowed to show unmistakably bad taste.