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Mariana Alcoforado, a 17th-century nun, was the presumed author of five celebrated love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaise (known in their many English editions as Portuguese Letters or Letters of a Portuguese Nun). The letters, ostensibly written by Alcoforado, cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent, to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, are nowadays generally reputed to have been a literary fake authored by a 17th -century French writer.
The Portuguese Nun, written by assistant professor of Romance languages Anna Klobucka, describes the foundation and development of the myth of Soror Mariana and illuminates Portugal’s continuing investment in the fabrication, by the country’s cultural elite, of a shared national imagination.
The book examines the process of national reappropriation of the text from the Romantic period until its latest, postmodern manifestations exemplified most remarkably by the feminist manifesto Novas Cartas Portuguesas [New Portuguese Letters]. In Klobucka’s interpretation, the account of the invention of the Portuguese nun by the Portuguese forms an allegorical correlative to cultural negotiation of identity accompanying, particularly since the last decades of the 19th-century, the gradually unfolding drama of Portuguese marginality in Europe and the world. |
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