Essay
New Portuguese Letters
Novas Cartas Portuguesas
Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa · 1972
Synopsis
Three women write to one another and write together, without ever saying who wrote what. They start from a seventeenth-century book, the letters of a nun of Beja abandoned by a French officer, and answer it three hundred years later: letters, poems, stories, fragments, pieces of legal texts. In them they speak of the body, motherhood, abortion, the colonial war and what a country does to its women.
Context
The three authors met twice a week in Lisbon, from March to October 1971, and exchanged the texts they wrote, signed by all three without anything indicating the hand of each. During printing, a worker judged the book pornographic and work was suspended; according to the 1974 judgment, the authors then revised a few passages, whereas other accounts say that Natália Correia, literary director of the publisher Estúdios Cor, refused any cuts. Published in April 1972, the book was banned after three days. The trial, opened on 25 October 1973, spilled beyond the borders: Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch supported the authors, and demonstrations were held in front of Portuguese embassies. The revolution of April 1974 put an end to it.
Who it is for
A book in three voices, mixing letters, poems and essays. It is not read in a linear way, and it is better to know first the nun's letters to which it responds.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first international feminist cause, it is still today one of the most translated Portuguese books.
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