Volume 22, Number 4 · March 20, 1975
Liberation in Lisbon
By Neal Ascherson
The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters
by Maria Isabel Barreno, by Maria Teresa Horta, by Maria Velho da Costa, translated by Helen R. Lane
Doubleday, 432 pp., $10.00
The revolutionary Portugal of this year and last year may at first seem infinitely removed from the land in which this book, and that older book which partly inspired it, were written. The original 'Portuguese Letters,' which may have been a seventeenth-century forgery, as some recent scholars insist, were presumably written to the lover who had abandoned her by a young nun, Mariana Alcoforado, from her convent at Beja in the brown silent plains of the Alentejo. The New Portuguese Letters, a huge and complicated garland—or perhaps wreath—of poetry and prose written by three women, dates from the last years of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship.
Review, 1719 words
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