The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth

by Anna M. Klobucka

This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises. Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are now generally reputed to have been a literary, fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer. This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres portugaises. Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army, they are now generally reputed to have been a literary, fake authored by a seventeenth-century French writer.

151 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Anna M. Klobucka holds an MA in Iberian Studies from the University of Warsaw (Poland) and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (1993). She taught at the Ohio State University and the University of Georgia before coming to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2001. At UMass Dartmouth, she teaches primarily Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. She served as Chair of the Department of Portuguese from 2003 to 2007. She is the author of The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Bucknell, 2000; Portuguese translation issued by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda in 2006) and O Formato Mulher: A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2009). She has co-edited the volumes After the Revolution: Twenty Years of Portuguese Literature 1974-1994 (Bucknell University Press, 1997), Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (University of Toronto Press, 2007; Portuguese translation published in 2010 by Assírio & Alvim), and Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her articles have appeared in Colóquio/Letras, Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Slavic and Eastern European Journal, and SubStance, among other journals. She was also the lead author of the first edition of Ponto de Encontro: Portuguese as a World Language (Prentice Hall, 2007). She served as Vice-President (2003-04) and President (2005-06) of the American Portuguese Studies Association. In 2007, she was recognized as UMass Dartmouth's Scholar of the Year. She currently serves as Executive Editor of the open-access online Journal of Feminist Scholarship, published by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at UMass Dartmouth.