Clara Noble

Clara Noble Malvido (10 September 1872 – 26 April 1946) was a Spanish lady and the wife of the poet Joan Maragall.

Early life and education
According to the baptism certificate, Clara Noble Malvido was born at five in the morning on 10 September 1872, at No. 9 Bizcocheros Street, in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, as the daughter of Ernst Noble Barber, an English insurance broker who was visiting southern Spain on business when he met his future wife, María de las Angustias Malvido Nocedo, an Andalusian lady from Jerez. She was the third of seven children, including his older brother Ubaldo.

Like most daughters of wealthy families of the time, Noble had an important cultural training, typical of the academies for young ladies that existed in the city and which also included "decorative" subjects, such as music (she played the piano) and the French and English languages, which she mastered both, the latter because of her father.

Marriage
The Noble Malvido family settled in Catalonia in 1885, but spent their summers in Puigcerdá, where Noble met her future husband Joan Maragall in the summer of 1888, when she was 16 years old, while he was close to 28. After three years of courtship, they married on 27 December 1891, in the Santa Anna de Barcelona. The couple settled in a flat on Carrer Roger de Llúria, then Paseo de Gràcia. In 1896 they changed their house again to go to Carrer de Consell de Cent, and in 1899 to their final home, very close to where the Noble Malvidos lived, in Carrer d'Alfons XII, n. 79, current headquarters of the Joan Maragall Archive. They had thirteen children, six girls and seven boys: Helena (1893), Maria (1894), Eulàlia (1896), the twins Clara and Anna (1899) Josep (1900), Joan-Anton Maragall i Nobles (1902), Ernest (1903), Guillem (1905), Raimon (1906), Elvira (1907), Gabriel (1909) and Jordi Maragall i Noble (1911).

On the same day of their marriage, Maragall, who had been working at Diario de Barcelona for just over a year as editor, received from friends the non-commercial edition of Poesías, a collection of his own work. The correspondence that they maintained was published for the first time in 2011 under the title Letters of courtship and with the edition of the Maragallista Glòria Casals. Soon these and many other later letters preserved in the Archive were published in the Digital Memory of Catalonia. In total, Maragall wrote 51 letters to Noble. The courtship letters between Maragall and Clara are crucial to understanding Maragall's process of entry into adult life (marriage and responsibilities) and recognition as a poet.

Personal life
Noble went through all sorts of ups and downs in her life: Brief separations from her husband when she went to Cauterets in the summer, her children's illnesses and then marriages, and the administration of her heritage, which allowed her to raise all her children and shelter them in their lives. Everything very fair, without luxuries or whims.

Willie Noble Malvido (1874–1895), Clara's sickly brother who died at just 21 years old, is the protagonist of a fairly well-known poem by Maragall, En la mort d'un jove (In the death of a young man).

Influence in Maragall's legacy
Her figure was fundamental in the poet's life and work. She tried at all times that family and social burdens did not interfere with Maragall's work as a writer. She was a discreet presence, quite silent, but attentive to everything that was happening around her. After the death of her husband in December 1911, Clara successfully took charge of carrying out the edition of the Obres Completes de Maragall, which was published in 1912 by Gustau Gili, thus tying up his legacy: letters, documents, articles, a whole collection of material that had been kept for many years in the office on the ground floor of the tower and that would be the core of the future Joan Maragall Archive, later deposited in the Library of Catalonia.

This Archive also preserves Noble's documentation, such as a personal diary, letters and photographs, account books, and household invoices; material that shows her personality and the role she played as Joan Maragall's life partner. Noble, her children and her descendants fought to perpetuate the poet's memory.

Death
Maragall's struggles with his personal anxiety sometimes impacted his loved ones around him, especially his wife, who thus developed a tendency to hypertension. In her later years, Noble's health became precarious due to hypertension, and she broke even more during the Spanish Civil War. Noble died on 26 April 1944, in Carrer Alfons XII, number 79 in Barcelona, in the family house in Sant Gervasi, which is currently the headquarters of the Archive Joan Maragall.