Sofía Casanova (30 September 1861 – 16 January 1958) (formally in , ) was a poet, novelist, and journalist, the first Spanish woman to become a permanent correspondent in a foreign country and a war correspondent. She was a cultured woman, well-known in the literary circles of the time. In her work she highlighted the human aspect of her chronicles as a correspondent for the newspaper ABC in Poland and Russia, where she reported on the suffering of the civilian population during the wars she covered, adding literary value. Her activity throughout Europe allowed her to experience events such as the First World War, the fall of Czarist Russia, the emergence of the Bolshevik regime, and the Second World War. She wrote for newspapers such as ABC, , El Liberal, and El Imparcial, for the magazine Galicia, for other Galician publications, and for the international press, such as the Gazeta Polska and the New York Times. Of Catholic and monarchical convictions in the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Francoist ranks. Her long life allowed her to leave behind a broad collection of writings covering all literary genres.
Family and youth
Casanova descended from a multinational family. Her paternal grandfather, Vicente Pérez Losada, was Portuguese by birth; he married a Madrid girl, herself daughter to a family born in Mexico but of Basque origin. They settled in Orense and this is where Casanova's father, Vicente Pérez Eguía, was born; he worked as a lithographer. Casanova's maternal grandfather, Juan Bautista Casanova Pla Canela, was from El Ferrol, but he spent many years in navy service in Spanish possessions in Nueva España. He married a girl of Dutch descent from New Orleans; both settled in La Coruña shortly before the birth of their daughter, Rosa Casanova Estomper. Casanova was an illegitimate child, a rather unusual and scandalous case in Spain and Galicia at the time. Her father married her mother in January 1863; according to various sources the couple had either one or two more children. In 1865 Vicente Pérez abandoned his family and moved to Madrid; none of the sources consulted provides any details on his occupation or private life. Few years later he disappeared. According to some authors he left Spain for America; other biographers have doubts and note that the ship he allegedly had boarded sunk on the Atlantic, yet he was not on the passenger list; At that time he was already a fugitive; in 1871 he was wanted by the Madrid judiciary for embezzlement and fraud. One more scholar claims that by the mid-1880s he was already dead.
The abandoned mother and her children stayed in A Coruña, supported financially by Juan Bautista Casanova. Casanova spent her childhood at the Pazo del Hombre in , in the A Coruña province, and began her studies at the local Doña Concha school. In 1873 the family – including her mother, brothers, and maternal grandparents – took up residence in Madrid. The first years in the capital were initially very hard for the young girl; unaccustomed to Castilian heat she was longing for Galician climate, and given financial misery of the family, she had to support the economy by giving lessons. Their standing improved upon receiving a heritage from Casanova's paternal family.
In Madrid, Casanova frequented the Conservatorio, where she began to study poetry and declamation. Her first poems were published when she was fifteen years old, in the Faro de Vigo. It was not she but her mother who sent them to the newspaper after finding them in her room. Casanova's talent for poetry was recognized in the most select literary circles that she frequented assiduously. She started to make friends in the Madrid literary world, above all with Blanca de los Ríos. She was noticed by Marquis of Valmar, who facilitated publications of her poems in the Madrid titles , , , and and in the Barcelona-based ; she was also publishing in the Galician and . In the early 1880s she has already earned her name as a promising, young poet.
At the court of Alfonso XII
Already by 1872, her poetry was presented during literary evenings at Teatro de Variedades; during the following few years she got used to stage appearances when reading her poems and it seems that in the late 1870s she was already moderately successful. In the early 1880s, she earned her name as a promising, young poet, praised as "". By that time she also began a career of an actress; between 1878 and 1882 she was noted as performing for Teatro Español or Teatro de Alhambra. She initially appeared in the press under her proper surname "Sofía Pérez Casanova"; in the early 1880s, she was referred to as "Sofía Casanova".