Cecilia Böhl de Faber (Morges, Switzerland 1796 – Sevilla 1877), also known by her literary pseudonym “Fernán Caballero”, outstanding representative of traditionalist-Romantic literature and precursor of costumbrismo, was the eldest daughter of the philologist Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber and his wife Frasquita Larrea. In 1806 her parents separated, and Cecilia accompanied her father to Germany. After some home schooling she entered a boarding school in Hamburg, managed by the French royalist émigré Mme Maintenon. In 1813 the family reunited and settled in Cádiz, where in 1816 Cecilia married the captain Antonio Planells, who died shortly afterwards.

In 1822, Cecilia Böhl remarried, this time with the future marquis of Arco Hermoso. The couple established their residence in Seville, where Cecilia, encouraged by her mother, wrote her first literary works. In 1837, two years after the death of her second husband, Cecilia married Antonio Arrom de Ayala. An admirer of Honoré de Balzac, she wrote her most important novels during these years; but they were not published until after 1849, when La Gaviota (specified, in the subtitle, as a novela de constumbres) appeared in instalments in the newspaper El Heraldo. The novel (written originally in French and translated by José Joaquín de Mora) was an immediate success; as, over the following years, Fernán Caballero’s major works appeared (La familia de Alvareda, Elia o la España treinta años ha, Una en otra), she became a national celebrity.

Her novels were especially valued by post-1848 conservative writers like Mora, Eugenio de Ochoa, and Manuel Cañete, who appreciated the books’ native response to a European Romantic image of Andalusia and their royalist, Catholic, and conservative purport. As the anti-liberal tone of her (invariably moralistic) works became more pronounced, she lost the support of moderate liberals, especially after her Clemencia of 1852.

In her novels she championed a moral and Catholic regeneration of the Spanish nation, a process in which she accorded a decisive role to Spanish women (although she opposed the feminist proposals of other Romantic authors like George Sand, Carolina Coronado, or Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda). Her works became celebrated showcases for a new political culture, neo-Catholicism, but, while she had patrons in court circles around Isabella II, her work lost credibility in liberal literary circles. However, she received support from the very influential duke of Montpensier and was internationally recognized following the highly positive reviews of her works by Antoine de Latour.

Cecilia Böhl was also the first Spanish author to systematically collect popular tales, proverbs, sayings, and songs from the Andalusian country, following the procedure of the Grimm brothers and invoking a German-Romantic notion (which her father imparted to her) of their underlying Volksgeist. She started collecting folklore material in the 1820s, and inserted these elements profusely in her novels and stories, after adapting them as to phraseology and moral import. In 1859 she published Cuentos y poesías populares andaluzas, and in 1877, the year of her death, Cuentos, oraciones, adivinas y refranes populares e infantiles.