Elisabeth Mulder (1904–1987)

Elisabeth Mulder was born in Barcelona, Spain. Her parents were Enrique Mulder García, a doctor of Dutch-Spanish origins, and Zoraida Pierluigi Grau, of Puerto Rican-Italian-Catalan ancestry. Though she inherited the title Marquise of Tedema Toelosdorp from her father, she never used it. She spent part of her childhood in her mother's native Puerto Rico, and traveling in Europe, becoming fluent in six languages. She studied piano with Enrique Granados in Barcelona, and began working as a journalist. In 1921, she married Ezequiel Dauner, a Catalan lawyer and politician nearly 30 years her senior, with whom she had a son. Until her husband's death in 1931, she signed his works as Elisabeth Mulder de Dauner. Elisabeth published her first collection of poetry, Embrujamiento (Bewitching), in 1927, and her first novel, Una sombra entre los dos (A Shadow Between the Two), in 1934. She also wrote children's literature and plays. She translated numerous works by Russian, English/American, and French authors, including The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, the poems of Baudelaire, Keats, and Shelley, and writings of Aleksandr Pushkin. She alternated her fiction writing with journalism for publications such as La Vanguardia Española, Destino y Solidaridad Nacional, Barcelona, ABC de Madrid and the Caracas Literary Index. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she was active in literary and cultural circles around Eugeni d'Ors.