Jorge Isaacs

Origins and early life

Jorge Isaacs was born in Cali on 1 April 1837, the son of George Henry Isaacs, an English Jew from Jamaica who had settled in the Cauca valley as a merchant and planter, and of Manuela Ferrer, a Catholic Colombian of Spanish descent, and this fiche states plainly that his father converted to Catholicism in order to marry and that Jorge was baptized and raised a Catholic. The Jewish origin was nonetheless a known and acknowledged fact of his life, and he wrote it into his masterpiece: the heroine of María is born Ester, the daughter of a Jewish family from Jamaica, brought as a child to the Cauca hacienda where she is baptized, and the novel's undertow of exile and loss owes much to the author's own inheritance.

Work and career

He was educated in Bogotá, fought in the civil war of 1860–1862, and lost his father's estates, El Paraíso and La Manuelita, to debt. In 1864 he published a volume of Poesías with the literary circle El Mosaico, and in 1867 María, the story of Efraín and his cousin's doomed love on a hacienda in the Cauca valley. It became the most widely read novel of nineteenth-century Spanish America, with more than fifty editions in the author's lifetime and translations into many languages.

He was a member of congress, secretary of the Colombian legation in Chile, superintendent of public education in Cauca, and a founder of the Liberal newspaper La República. In 1881–1882 he led a scientific expedition to the Magdalena coal and Guajira regions and wrote a study of the indigenous peoples of the state of Magdalena. He died in Ibagué on 17 April 1895. The hacienda El Paraíso is today a museum, and in Colombia the mere name María means his book.