Ramón López Soler (Manresa 1799 – Madrid 1836), Catalan writer and journalist, was born into a family of traders. While studying law at the University of Cervera he developed his taste for literature and joined the Sociedad Filosófica de Barcelona, where he met writers like Ignasi Santpons Barba, Bonaventura Carles Aribau and Antonio Bergnes de las Casas.

During the Liberal Triennium (1820-23), López Soler contributed to radical-liberal magazines published in Barcelona under the pseudonym “Lopecio” (later he also used “Gregorio Pérez de Miranda”). In 1823 he started a journalistic project with Aribau and others, the seminal El Europeo: Periódico de Ciencias, Artes y Literatura (1823-24), which introduced new European ideas, authors and values to Spanish (especially Catalan) readers. In the pages of El Europeo, López Soler advocated the historicism of August Wilhelm Schlegel and the religious Romanticism of Chateaubriand; unlike Böhl von Faber, he drew on these to outline a liberal rather than conservative Romanticism.

El Europeo having been foundered in the post-1823 reactionary backlash, López Soler moved to Valencia in 1824, where he worked for a liberal publishing house and undertook a translation of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe into Spanish, which, however, failed to get published after problems with the censor. In 1830, López Soler published Los bandos de Castilla, o el caballero del cisne, on the Walter Scott model, to the point of incorporating sections directly translated from Ivanhoe and other Scott novels. He applied the same procedure in Kar-Osman o el pirata de Colombia (1832), based on Byron’s The Giaour, and La catedral de Sevilla (1834), calqued on Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Although López Soler never dissembled his debt to his models, he was repeatedly accused of plagiarism by critics such as Manuel Milá y Fontanals and, in the 20th century, Jean-Louis Picoche. Recently, critics have recalled that his prologue of Los bandos de Castilla was the first Romantic manifesto in Spain, and have highlighted the originality of these historical novels, which blend a meticulous historical reconstruction of the national past (in the manner of Scott) with the cynical, melancholic and passionate temperament of the main characters (in the manner of Byron), and which mix elements of novelistic realism with the free imagination of romance. This, so it is argued, makes López Soler the precursor of Mariano José de Larra and José de Espronceda.

After the publication of Los bandos de Castilla, López Soler achieved nationwide fame. In the following years he published other novels, like Jaime el Barbudo, o la sierra de Crevillente (1832), whose main character is a Romantic bandit, and El primogénito de Albuquerque (1833), which opened the first series of historical novels set in Spain. He also continued his work as a journalist. In 1832, he collaborated with the prestigious Revista Española; in the following year he started El vapor: Periódico mercantil, político y literario de Cataluña, one of the most important platforms for liberal Romanticism in Spain, the voice of liberal conservatism and bourgeois interests in Catalonia, and supportive of the moderate regime of the Estatuto Real. In the summer of 1835, the radical upheavals of Barcelona forced López Soler to flee to France. Back in Madrid, he contributed to El Español until his untimely death in 1836.