Ferré << feh RAY >>, Rosario (1938-2016), a Puerto Rican author, ranks among the leading figures in modern Latin American literature. Ferré won praise as a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her major theme is Puerto Rican identity, written from a historical and feminist viewpoint.
Ferré was a member of one of Puerto Rico’s wealthiest families. Her father, Luis Ferré, was governor of Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1973. Her family background provided much of the inspiration for her stories about the island’s upper class.
Ferré is best known for her novels. The House on the Lagoon (1995) portrays a wealthy and politically influential Puerto Rican family from 1917 to the 1980’s. Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998) describes the lives of two Puerto Rican families in the early 1900’s. Flight of the Swan (2001) is a novel about a famous Russian ballet dancer and her company stranded in Puerto Rico in 1917.
Ferré published a short novel and several short stories in the collection Damn Dust (1986). She later translated the book into English as Sweet Diamond Dust (1988). The stories focus on a family history that symbolizes the class struggles and political evolution of Latin America and Puerto Rico in particular. In addition to her adult fiction, Ferré wrote critical essays, poetry, and children’s stories.
Rosario Josefina Ferré was born in Ponce on Sept. 28, 1938. She was educated at Wellesley College and Manhattanville College and earned a Ph.D. degree at the University of Maryland in 1986. Ferré also studied at the University of Puerto Rico.
From 1972 to 1975, Ferré and other Puerto Rican writers and critics published a popular literary journal called Loading and Unloading Zone. She gained recognition as a writer with her first book, The Youngest Doll (1976), a collection of feminist short stories. Ferré wrote only in Spanish until the 1990’s, when she began writing in English in an attempt to widen her readership. Ferré died on Feb. 18, 2016.
