[2] 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 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.

According to some authors he left Spain for America;[8] 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;[6] At that time he was already a fugitive; in 1871 he was wanted by the Madrid judiciary for embezzlement and fraud.

[7] Casanova spent her childhood at the Pazo del Hombre in San Julián de Almeiras [es], in the A Coruña province,[11] and began her studies at the local Doña Concha school.

[12] 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.

Among the women writers she knew were Concepción Jimeno Gil, her younger friend Blanca de los Ríos,[4] Sofía Tartilán, Filomena Dato, and Emilia Pardo Bazán.

One anecdote has it that even the prime minister Antonio Cánovas was kept waiting in the antechamber while Alfonso XII could have not brought himself to interrupt Casanova reciting poetry.

The book was financed by the king himself;[7] the set was prologued by Ricardo Blanco Asenjo [es], a poet and literary critic fairly popular at the time, working for a number of prestigious periodicals.

Absorbed by family duties Casanova has almost ceased to write; her only literary attempt of the time is a set of short stories based on her own experiences in what was still an exotic country to her, El doctor Wolski: páginas de Polonia y Rusia, published in Madrid in 1894.

Their house at Plac na Groblach [pl] became sort of a cultural and social hub; every Wednesday they staged literary sessions with eminent local writers taking part.

Her trips also allowed her to meet personalities from the intellectual and political world such as Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Morel-Fatio, whose opinions about the Spanish she collected in books and conferences.

In 1909, she published Más que amor, a romance novel featuring a widowed Spanish woman living in Poland; the work contained barely veiled references to her own bitter experiences.

This was a reaction, according to the scholar María del Carmen Simón Palmer [es], of numerous writings of the late 19th and early 20th century against feminist currents from the United States.

[12] She reported on it in a letter to ABC, trying to convince her compatriots that their growing admiration for the Germans was not justified;[7] however, in general she tried to stick to the officially adopted neutral standpoint.

[37] In the late summer of 1914, Luis Morote, a Russian correspondent for Heraldo de Madrid, happened to be in Warsaw seeking news on the war developments.

She continued working in the hospital and shortly before the German takeover of Warsaw she fled with her daughters on the last train to Minsk and Moscow, where she remained with the family of her brother-in-law until October 1916.

[43] During the popular uprising of 3 July, harshly suppressed by government troops, Casanova received an accidental blow in the eyes from one of those fleeing the street shooting.

[50] Halina (1897–1989) married physician Czesław Meissner [pl], who as a nationalist deputy served in the Polish interwar parliament three times; the couple lived in Poznań.

She kept writing, busy mostly with providing correspondence from Warsaw to various Spanish periodicals, chiefly ABC, where she published under the heading Desde Polonia; in the 1920s her contributions alone amounted to some 400.

In the Spanish papers she was noted usually either in the societé columns[58] or in relation to her subsequent books; in the early 1930s left-wing press started to mock her accounts of revolutionary horrors she had witnessed.

[7] At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Casanova lived in Warsaw; she almost immediately declared herself in favor of the Nationalists and together with her daughters and grandchildren participated in a number of events supposed to support the cause among the Poles.

[61] In her contributions she clearly sided with the Nationalist faction[62] and hailed the Crusade, lambasting the Republicans as "hordes which lost the right to call themselves humans and which should rather be dealt with by zoology".

[68] In December of that year, she declared to La Voz de Galicia on the occasion of her departure to Warsaw that she was convinced that the coup d'état provoked by an army sector would bring moments of development and splendor to Spain.

One author plays down her support for the Nationalists by claiming that she "let herself be carried away, perhaps with good will, by the advice of some friends", all resulting from her experiences during the past, including these related to the Bolshevik Revolution.

[69] Another one of Casanova's biographers underlines the weight of her experiences of 1917–1920 and suggests that they prevented the old woman from noticing the genuine nature of "the army, which cracked down on just claims of own people and left them in the pool of blood".

[79] At the time of the founding of the Royal Galician Academy, in 1906, Casanova already had work and recognition worldwide, which led to her being named a member of this organization, and in 1952 she was unanimously granted the title of academic of honor.

[87] She is treated somewhat more extensively only in synthetic works on Spanish feminist literature; the opinion which hails her as "the most significant poet of this [19th century] period, and one of Spain's most remarkable women"[88] is rather exceptional.

Instead of a great woman of literature, she is presented rather as an extraordinary person who lived a fascinating life, crossed cultural frontiers and was witness to many dramatic developments of her era.

She is discussed against the background of the feminine movement, gender issues, social change, the Russian Revolution, nationalism, both world wars, the history of journalism, cross-cultural challenges, cultural conflict in Spain, and Spanish-Polish or Spanish-Russian relations.

Among Casanova's grandchildren the best known was Karol Meissner [pl], a Benedictine presbyter, academic, translator and great personality among the Polish conventual clergy;[103] Maria Niklewicz became a nun and longtime abbess of the Visitandine convent in Warsaw.