The Lettres Portugaises: Scripting and selling female desire

This article builds on previous literary scholarship to analyse the social and publication history of the enormously successful Lettres portugaises (1669), five letters published in the voice of an anonymous Portuguese nun to a French officer. Although the letters were based on an ancient model, this article suggests that their references to contemporary gendered constructions of biology and love, especially for enclosed women, were successfully used by publishers to commercialise a historically recurring gender binary of heterosexual love: men were rejected and women were abandoned. The popularity of the text was such that it entrenched notions of women's helplessness in matters of the heart for almost three centuries. This article argues that the Lettres portugaises’ success was as much the result of the text's literary qualities as it was of the canny paratextual strategies deployed by seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century publishers to sell the book, its sequels and its imitations.

The Lettres portugaises traduites en François were a publishing sensation. 1Published in 1669 by the Parisian publisher, Claude Barbin, five short letters written by a Portuguese nun named Mariana to her French lover in the aftermath of the Portuguese Restoration War (1640−1668) rapidly became one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century.Indeed, no sooner had Barbin released his edition in Paris than pirated editions appeared attributed to Isaac van Dyck of Amsterdam and Pierre Marteau of Cologne, the latter an Amsterdam imprint used by anonymous publishers to print anti-French satire, sexually explicit titles and bootlegged editions of texts protected by a royal privilege. 2Although the first edition was published anonymously, Dutch editions were sold with an altered title in order to expose Mariana's correspondent and her translator.Curious readers learned that the Marquis de Chamilly was the scoundrel while Gabriel de Guilleragues had deciphered the Portuguese. 3 Barbin retaliated by publishing a second edition with two additional letters, and the same was done in pirated editions shortly thereafter. 4A Parisian rival, Jean-Baptiste Loyson, and a Grenoblois publisher, Robert Philippes, were also quick to capitalise on the rapidly growing interest in the letters, publishing fictitious replies from 'Chamilly' in the same year, the former adopting an epistolary paratext highly evocative of Barbin's, designed to link the two editions. 5he cultural impact of the letters was swift: Madame de Sévigné was already using une portugaise as shorthand for a passionate love letter in 1671. 6This is not surprising.In less than twelve months, five different editions appeared in France and Goldstein's call for further investigation of the way they provide 'important clues regarding contemporary readings of the Lettres portugaises, readings which influence a definition of feminine writing formulated in the criticism of this text and then expanded to define and contain all women's writing'. 20In so doing, this essay suggests that the enduring popularity and cultural impact of the Lettres portugaises is better understood when taking into account the ways in which gendered forms of expressing love inspired the marketing tactics of European publishers in the years and decades after Barbin first introduced the Lettres portugaises to a Parisian public.

Barbin and amatory literature
Between 1656 and 1660, Barbin published only eight books, mainly copies, but once he entered into a consortium to publish the satire Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, his fortunes changed. 21Between 1660 and 1669, he published 107 titles mainly on the subject of love, both classical, like an edition of Ovid's elegies in 1666, and neoclassical, like Du Perret's La Cour d'amour (1667).In this space, Barbin also gained a reputation as 'a publisher of women authors'. 22Barbin published fifty-one titles by fourteen different women throughout his career, like Henriette de Coligny La Suze's collection of galant letters. 23Although this was only about 10 per cent of the total books he published, it was a sizeable minority relative to his peers. 24Barbin, in particular, worked closely with Marie-Catherine-Hortense Desjardins (1640−1683), also known as Madame de Villedieu, and their partnership enabled her to become one of the few women writers of the seventeenth century to earn an income solely through writing. 25Barbin, however, was no proto-feminist.When Villedieu's ex-lover, Antoine Boësset, Sieur de Villedieu, offered to sell her private love letters to Barbin, the publisher jumped at the opportunity.Perhaps it was a deliberate ploy by all three individuals to create a scandal and a profit, but there is insufficient evidence to resolve intent.
In 1668, a year before the publication of the Lettres portugaises, Barbin published Lettres et billets galants naming Villedieu as the author in the privilege, but not the title page. 26Written over six years, the epistles tenderly exposed the difficult balance between her public identity as the writer Villedieu and her private life as Desjardins. 27fter discovering that her lover, Antoine Boësset, Sieur de Villedieu, had sold her letters to Barbin, she wrote to the publisher to explain why her correspondence should not be printed. 28First, she claimed, they would not make any sense to outsiders because of the intimacy between correspondents. 29Moreover, she told Barbin, the letters 'belong to my heart alone, and even if my hand had the audacity to steal away a few, no printer should be allowed to take advantage of those thefts'. 30This could have also been a strategy to protect her reputation because if her epistolary pleas to stop its publication were real, this only increased interest in the letters' contents. 31 Katharine Jensen has speculated that Villedieu's immodest and immoral behaviour as a woman in the public eye in the seventeenth century justified Barbin's violation of her wishes. 32Either way, Barbin decided that the letters made good business sense and published them in July 1668 to moderate success. 33Barbin's only concession was removing her name in the second edition. 34Even so, Barbin held legal ownership of Villedieu's letters through a royal privilege and, like the Portuguese nun six months later, saw fit to make her sentiments public. 35 privilege issued October 1668 suggests that the Lettres portugaises were to be published jointly in Les Valentins, Lettres portugaises, Epigrammes et Madrigaux de Guilleragues. 36However, Barbin had spotted a new trend: love letters, thanks to Villedieu.He chose to publish the Lettres portugaises as a single volume in January 1669, after registering the privilege in November 1668. 37Barbin published the rest of Guilleragues' writings in October of the same year, prefacing its contents with reference to the recent enthusiasm for expressions of love. 38He hoped that: 'the diversity of epigrams on all sorts of subjects will entertain you'. 39The decision to separate the two texts was probably motivated by profit: both were slightly over one hundred pages long.Any longer than that was unlikely to attract a customer desiring a cheap confection.Barbin also removed Guilleragues' name from the text, presumably to generate mystery. 40Finally, he renamed the October collection Valantins, questions d'amour & autres pieces galantes, removing literary terms like epigram or madrigal and replacing them with keywords that appealed to the vogue for all things galant and, implicitly, Ovidian.However, before analysing how publishers like Barbin sold the Lettres portugaises, it is first important to address the letters' sociocultural context.In the following section, I argue that the letters' structure was Ovidian, but that the language was contemporary and represented changing attitudes towards love based on contemporary medical and popular understandings of women's physiology.This gave the letters verisimilitude, which publishers used to market the book.

Ovidian, popular and medical models of love
In the 1970s, Ellen Moers identified the Heroides, a collection of fifteen epistles written to and from famous classical heroines, as the archetext for fictional works that articulate amatory experiences from the female point of view, especially love letters. 41 decade later, the literary scholar DeJean expanded Moers' claims to distinguish between male and female writers. 42According to DeJean, the Ovidian model of femalevoiced amatory narrators was considered by seventeenth-century French writers to be authentically female, regardless of whether the text was written by a man or a woman. 43However, some women writers like Scudéry resisted the Ovidian model: two of Scudéry's earliest works offered an alternative to the traditional Ovidian heroine: Lettres amoureuses de divers auteurs de ce temps (1641) and Les Femmes illustres ou les harangues héroïques (1642). 44The latter of which are twenty classical women's impassioned tirades that do not desire the return of their lovers, but rather set out the women's side of the story, especially for Sappho. 45Yet, despite the popularity of Scudéry's writing, most seventeenth-century French writers followed the Ovidian construction of heterosexual love: men are rejected and women are abandoned, issuing a lament directed towards the man who left her behind. 46he first letter of the Lettres portugaises contains the three elements of the abandoned woman's lament: desire, betrayal and death. 47According to Mariana, her lover 'betrayed [her] with false hopes', the 'passion that once bred so many prospects of pleasure' is now responsible for her pain, her eyes 'are deprived of the sole light that brought them life, now nothing is left, but tears'. 48Finally, Mariana has just learned that her lover has 'committed at last to a separation that is unbearable to [her] and will kill [her] very soon'. 49Thus, before the reader has even turned the first page, Mariana has already linked herself to one famous abandoned women: Dido.The nun's circumstances vividly recall those of the Queen of Carthage: Like Mariana herself and many other women, Dido was left behind by a man leading a military campaign. 50ndeed, the first English edition hinted at the parallels between the queen and the Portuguese nun in the preface: 'There was (it seems) an Intrigue of Love carry'd on betwixt a French Officer, and a Nun in Portugal.The Cavalier forsakes his Mistress and Returns for France'. 51Appearing in both Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Heroides, Dido's lovelorn suicide is a critical moment in both texts, and Mariana implies that her heart may lead her to a similar fate. 52lthough the Lettres portugaises largely imitated the Ovidian model of the abandoned woman, their lexicon instead reflected seventeenth-century French constructions of love and its risks for young women. 53Between 1670 and 1695, sentiment and sensibilité replaced Descartes' émotion (1649) and Scudéry's tendresse or tendre (1650−1670) to become the dominant forms of describing affect in seventeenthcentury French literature. 54Previously, passion was the primary synonym for love, but this was replaced by a group of words, sentiment, sensibilité, sentir, tendresse, tendre, amour, aimer, used by authors like Villedieu and Scudéry to scribe romance. 55Moreover, when such words were used by authors, they were often used in conjunction with the heart. 56The heart was depicted as operating independently of the body, controlling its owner.This represented a shift away from love being a 'passion of the soul' and becoming instead a 'sentiment of the heart'. 57Importantly, love taking on a physiological meaning made it easier to affirm that women were more susceptible to love's cruelty because of their biologically weaker organs. 58he physiological nature of women's love was also linked to their intense sexuality.For example, in the second letter, Mariana reminisces about the day her 'unhappy passion' was kindled, explaining how she was standing on her balcony when she spotted a solitary French soldier on horseback. 59She gazed longingly at the uniformed man who had paused in front of her.Convinced that he did so for her benefit, she continued to watch as he trotted his horse. 60Throughout her letters, she describes her sexual attraction using physiological language: she watched the soldier, succumbed to his touch, and ached in his absence.Contemporaries believed women to have a larger sexual appetite that could prove overwhelming, particularly in cloistered women. 61ndeed, in her last letter, Mariana attributed her lust to being young and having been 'enclosed in this convent since childhood'. 62Although Mariana's sexual frustration reflected popular and medical discourse, especially concerning cloistered women, it was unusual for a female narrator to make such immodest claims in literary works. 63s the letters unfold, Mariana moves away from typical Ovidian heroines to reveal behaviour in line with contemporary expectations of women's emotional and physiological responses to love, particularly with regard to anger.Contemporaries believed women to be more prone to anger due to their inferior physiology, but it was uncommon to see a woman write about her ire. 64Yet, Mariana's third letter opens with outrage: 'What will become of me, and what would you have me do?' followed by an indirect accusation: 'How far I am now from all that I had looked forward to!' 65 She accuses her lover of taking advantage of her licentiousness after he: 'deliberately, and in cold blood, conspired to awaken my love; [yet] you only regarded my passion as your triumph, and your heart was never deeply touched'. 66Mariana asks her lover to help her overcome the 'feebleness of my sex' and end her despair by returning to her. 67 If not, she ponders whether a 'tragic end' would force her lover to 'think of [her]  often', since such an 'uncommon death' would make her memory 'dear to you', evoking Dido's suicide. 68Mariana is aware of the intensity of her emotions, claiming in the fourth letter that 'it was the violence of my own desire that seduced me'. 69Pleasure, it turned out, became: 'pain I had never felt before; all the fluctuating moods that you cause in me are extreme'.Her only cure, she surmised, was to cease writing and forget about the soldier.The final paragraph of the penultimate letter begins and ends with 'good-bye', intermingled with further references to her death: 'I love you a thousand times more than my life' and, despairingly, 'Why have you poisoned my life?' 70 Women writers did not typically express anger because it was immodest, yet Mariana did not hold back from describing her ire and desire for violent revenge. 71Yet, the fifth and final letter openly blames the 'pride common to [her] sex', which stops her from resolving her anger. 72Despite her best intentions, the missive is caught in a discursive loop of rage, despair and shame.Her feelings and her love are both 'violent', which leads her to suggest revenge twice: once by her own hand and the second subject to the 'vengeance of [her] kinfolk'. 73At the same time, she is 'miserable', and 'vividly' feels 'shame for the crimes you made me commit'. 74Mariana does not address each emotion in turn; she jumps from one to the other, often in contradictory terms.To emphasise that Mariana truly has no control over her sentiments, despite her protestations otherwise, her last words are formulated as a question: 'Am I under any obligation to render you an exact account of all I do?' 75 It contrasts dramatically with the preceding sentence that claimed that she would not think of him nor write to him again.
Mariana's contradictory outbursts are another significant divergence from the Ovidian model.The articulate heroines of the Heroides were replaced by Mariana's repetitive and illogical prose, which created an effect of spontaneity and realism.Literary scholars like Jonathan Mallinson have claimed that Mariana appeared to be so real to contemporary readers because of the intensity of her lament. 76Unlike fictional characters in the works of Gomberville, La Calprenède and Scudéry, Mariana was immodest, immoral and controlled by her sentiments, which made her appear authentic and vulnerable to a seventeenth-century audience. 77But it was more than just sentiment: it was also her sexuality and physiological reactions which made her seem authentic to readers.Mariana reflected the consequences of poorly judged love for women whose biology made them seek out sexual attention, especially when confined to a convent.
Therefore, while the Lettres borrowed from the Heroides, and other elegiac and even epic poetry to structure the letters, Mariana was also constructed using her contemporaries' understanding of love and its physiological effects on women.As a result, she lacks substance, and it is unclear who Mariana is beyond her habit and lust.Even she admitted: 'I don't know who I am, nor what I am doing, nor what I want'. 78iterary scholars have suggested that this made it easier for men to project their own fantasies onto the nun because she lacked any defining qualities which implied agency or autonomy. 79I argue it also made it more enjoyable for men and women to read because, in the absence of complex rhetoric and allusive imagery, a publisher could market the Lettres as a diversion, something entertaining and scandalous to read.Its transgressive depiction of a woman in love compared with modest literary heroines was undoubtedly appealing.Therefore, the text's representations of gendered seventeenth-century physiological manifestations of love, rather than strictly literary models of expressing female heterosexual love, enabled publishers to market it in various ways to suit different markets and interests.

Commodifying Mariana
Without the literary artifice of Latin elegy, Mariana's voice seemed to give the reader unadulterated access to the mind of a woman trapped by her own desire.In England, for example, publishers capitalised on Mariana's 'Extravagant and Unfortunate Passion' to promote the text in prefaces, translator's notes and advertisements. 80The context in seventeenth-century London, however, was quite different to Paris.There was little support for women writers and this would have affected how the Lettres portugaises was read and received. 81However, scholars suggest that at the time there was an emerging demand for eroticism, which may have played a role in the success of the first edition. 82The paratext in the first edition reassured the reader that it was 'one of the most Artificial Pieces perhaps of the Kind, that is anywhere Extant'. 83In the seventeenth century, 'artificial' initially meant a piece of literature that displayed 'special art or skill' before it acquired its modern meaning in the eighteenth century. 84he second English edition went further and subtitled the letters 'one of the Most Passionate [p]Ieces That Possibly Ever Has Been Extant'. 85Passion in eighteenthcentury Britain was an emotional experience of which love was one of the most important permutations. 86Publishers seemed to claim that the Lettres portugaises represented the authentic passionate experience of an individual, as suggested by an early eighteenth-century verse translation that was simply titled Love without affectation. 87ther European publishers exploited the transgressive nature of the romantic pairing, like one of the first foreign editions printed by 'Pierre Marteau of Cologne' in 1669.In five pirated editions between 1669 and 1681, the preface was barely altered from that of Barbin, keeping the epistolary paratext word-for-word except for the inclusion of the name of the soldier and the translator. 88The bootlegged copies, however, had the title changed to Lettres d'amour d'une religieuse to draw attention to the scandalous nature of the letters and added Escrites au Chevalier de C., Officier François en Portugal. 89Cloistral pornography was a popular genre that began as an oral tradition picked up by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century and popularised in the seventeenth century. 90Early modern men, therefore, were positioned by such literature to view young nuns as especially lascivious due to being enclosed and, were consequently sexually frustrated. 91The title change may have also appealed to French Protestant refugees who perhaps would have appreciated a slight at Catholicism. 92n Venice, Mariana's devotion was used in the context of patronage.The first Italian translation was dedicated to a patrician, Federico Marcello, whom the translator, 'Narbonte Pordoni', thought might be interested in reading about a love affair between two elites. 93Pontio Bernardon had just started his publishing career and was forming a reputation for publishing translated and untranslated French works. 94Unlike the Dutch editions, the Italian edition did not mention an enclosed woman, titled instead: 'Portuguese love letters between a Portuguese noblewoman and a French chevalier'. 95ordoni claims that it might be 'indecent' to read about the life that the 'impassioned Dama' has led, but it certainly lent itself to be read 'with utmost curiosity, or [perhaps] close attention'. 96erhaps Bernardon wanted to avoid religious controversy, given Venetian censorship, and instead appeal to the sensibilities of a high-ranking patrician who would find entertainment in a scandalous affair between elite families. 97Indeed, the preface is written specifically for Marcello.Searching for patrons, Bernardon used the story of the 'noblewoman' and the 'grand chevalier' as a metaphor for his patron-client relationship.He claimed that 'the Passion of another bears witness to my own', evidence of his 'obsequious Devotion' to Marcello. 98This paratext gestures towards the continued relevance of social status in the expression of passion, in this case, patron and client.In other words, the Lettres portugaises could be interpreted in different ways, in different geographical and linguistic contexts, based on how the publisher presented it.
Once the initial novelty of the letters wore off in the early eighteenth century, British publishers repackaged the text to revive interest in the text.In 1702, a new publisher advertised the Lettres portugaises as a language-learning method by re-releasing the translation in a parallel-text edition aimed at a general readership: 'the English being on the opposite page for the benefit of the ingenious of other languages'. 99The edition also included an advertisement informing the reader that the publisher had just released the 'Nineteenth Edition of that Excellent French Grammar, by Claudius Mauger', as well as the French Common-Prayer 'on a good Paper and Character'. 100 Seven years later, another publisher produced a verse translation which was accompanied by educational material, including a 'Prefatory Discourse of the Nature and Use of Such Epistles', 'the Time when They Were Written' and the 'True Names and Circumstances of the Persons Concern'd in Them'. 101The popularity of the text encouraged publishers to find different uses for it, allowing it to evolve from an erotic tale of female desire to a pedagogical tool that nevertheless reinforced gendered dynamics of love.
The commercial success of the Lettres portugaises did not go unnoticed or uncriticised, at least by Barbin's peers in France.In 1700, a satirical dialogue, L'École du monde, featured a series of interviews between a father and son.In the fifth interview, the father instructed his son on the importance of education.He explained that a young woman would be unable to 'tell the difference between Boileau, or a satire, and a Barbinade or the Mercure galant'. 102'And', the son asked, 'What do you mean by Barbinade?' 103 A Barbinade, the father began, 'are trinket-like books that do nothing except to waste time fruitlessly.After reading one of these [books], one's esprit is as improved as if one had read nothing'.But, he continued, 'that did not stop [them] from enriching our friend, Barbin'. 104A Barbinade may have been a trifle to some, but educated men evidently read them enough to line Barbin's pockets.They were also enthusiastic for similar epistolary works, which led women writers to imitate the Lettres portugaises, particularly in France, albeit with critical changes to the paradigm.

Imitations of the Lettres portugaises
The success of the Lettres portugaises fuelled a market for a certain consumable version of female desire, inspiring a number of imitations that took part in or challenged this market.For example, Madame de Villedieu published several titles in the 1670s that appeared to be inspired by the Portuguese nun.In 1670, she published Annales galantes (1670), a tale of a passionate love affair between a cloistered woman and a rogue. 105A couple of years later, she addressed the real-life theft of her amatory correspondence in Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1672−1674) by fictionalising one of her own stolen letters, taking back control of its words. 106Similarly, in Portefeuille (1674), she subverted the Lettres portugaises by claiming to have found a collection of male-authored love letters abandoned in a Parisian garden.Like Barbin, she did not know the author's identity, but, as she told a female correspondent, she saw fit to publish them because 'the manner in which they are written is quite fashionable'. 107The letter in Princesse de Clèves (1678), published anonymously, but thought to be the work of Madame de La Fayette (1634−1693) was also likely to have been a reference as well. 108n England, Aphra Behn also experimented with the narrative elements of the Lettres portugaises after the first London editions were published.Although Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684−1687) was initially published anonymously, the second volume has the imprint 'London: printed for the author, 1685', and the dedication of the second and third volumes are signed: 'A.B.'. 109 It is unclear why Behn made her authorship difficult to discern, but it is possible that Behn wanted to generate interest through mystery, take control of the writing process, or shield herself from criticism on account of being a woman. 110Evoking the circumstances of the Lettres portugaises, and Desjardin's Portefeuille, Behn's opening epistle explained that when she was: 'at Paris last Spring, met with a little Book of Letters, call'd L'Intregue de Philander et Silvia I had a particular fancy, besides my inclinations to translate 'em into English, which I have done as faithfully as I cou'd'. 111owever, Behn, like Villedieu, resisted the Lettres portugaises' treatment of the female heterosexual romantic voice.Part One includes, for example, the letters of both man and woman writing towards their eventual consummation, rather than from the woman's perspective after the abandonment. 112It also addressed contemporary English politics by alluding to a recent sex scandal: the marriage of Lady Henriette Berkeley and Lord Grey of Werke. 113Behn substituted the English political context for analogous French institutions and families while also drawing on seventeenth-century postal, legal and espionage practices. 114It was successful and circulated throughout the first half of the eighteenth century in London and Dublin. 115y distilling discourse around female heterosexuality into an attractive and readable format, the Lettres portugaises and the epistolary novel remained in circulation for centuries.However, women writers continued to challenge its construction of love and how this emotion affected the female lover.For example, the Lettres portugaises likely inspired, in part, the eighteenth-century publishing sensation: the Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747) by Françoise de Graffigny (1695−1758). 116Like the Lettres portugaises, the Lettres d'une Péruvienne was printed around fifty times within the first thirty years of its publication and translated into five languages in the same period. 117nlike the Lettres portugaises, it was written by a woman and challenged both Eurocentrism and the institution of marriage.The Incan protagonist, Zilla, is kidnapped by Spanish conquistadors, captured by the French, and transported to France in the aftermath of a maritime battle.Struck by melancholy, the cure for her malady is to write.Her letters deliver a searing critique of French society as an outsider and as a woman.In particular, Zilla's decision to choose celibacy over marriage generated enormous controversy, but Graffigny refused to change the ending in the 1752 edition. 118nofficial sequels, however, satiated the public's appetite for an ending that promised marriage, and which undermined Zilla's independence and control over her destiny. 119lthough the Lettres d'une Péruvienne declined in popularity in the nineteenth century, the Lettres portugaises still had an audience as late as the twentieth century.Henri Matisse was so inspired by the passion in the letters that he illustrated a special edition with portraits of the Portuguese nun. 120Similarly, the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke declared that Mariana was: 'that incomparable woman, in whose eight [sic] heavy letters woman's love is for the first time charted from point to point without display, without exaggeration or mitigation, as by the hand of a sibyl'. 121When he loaned the book to the artist Gwen John, she agreed they were beautiful, but unsophisticated 'like a bird singing'. 122Yet, to Rilke and his contemporaries, Mariana's intense sentiments that controlled and overwhelmed her were what they had been socialised to believe flowed in the minds and bodies of women for centuries.

Conclusion
In 1972, three centuries after the Lettres portugaises, three Portuguese women reclaimed Mariana in a text called Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972).Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa copied the nun's original correspondence and added their own fiction, letters, essays, poems and even legal documents to create a literary work that defies classification.The three women wrote in the voices of both oppressed women --cousins of Mariana --and violent men fighting in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961−1974) in Africa, abandoning their wives who remained faithful to them. 123The text does not have an internal logic, forming a collage of erotica, poetry and legislation, with no identifiable author.This was purposeful because the three writers wanted the work to be unified as 'a symbol of their sisterhood and the common sufferings of women'. 124They called their writing a 'trialetic', which disrupted the binary oppositions used to 'define and circumscribe women, desire, discourse'. 125For their efforts, the three women were arrested under charges of 'abuse of the freedom of the press' and 'outrage to public decency' in authoritarian Portugal under the Estado Novo. 126International outrage followed until they were finally pardoned after a coup ended the dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano on 25 April 1974. 127he implicit and explicit uses of the Lettres portugaises over time is symbolic of its shifting reception.In the 1990s, Frédéric Deloffre, one of a pair of French literary scholars who had dismissed Mariana as the author in the 1960s, neatly summarised how reading the Lettres portugaises was like peering into a looking glass. 128Readers admired the letters for 'what they did not have: a work without a past, without references, without an author, a meteor that came from nowhere'. 129Anyone, he went on, could 'attribute it to this or that (national) literature, Portuguese or French, to this author, known or unknown, change the title, change the order of its parts, or even join it to its "sequels" or "replies"'. 130Literary scholars, he claimed, deprived the text of 'all human reality, an empty place populated by the spectre of "readings", semiotic, feminist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist readings, above all rhetorical'. 131Yet, while these readings were critical to understanding the text's literary milieu, the Lettres portugaises had a visible impact on the wider cultural imagination.This impact was naturally facilitated by the letters themselves, but it was the way that they were presented to the public tells us something of the way in which they struck such a chord with readers between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
The publisher's role in commodifying the female voice is an overlooked but crucial means to understand the enduring popularity of both the text and the paradigm it created.Although the Lettres portugaises were structured according to a classical model, their contents were based on contemporary sociocultural ideas of women that created verisimilitude.Rather than publicise the literary qualities of Mariana's correspondence, publishers instead marketed the intensity of her sentiments and the scandal inherent in the love letters of an enclosed woman to attract would-be readers.Barbin, Brome, the Amsterdam bootlegs, Loyson, Philippe and Bernardon all highlighted, in titles, prefaces and sequels, the exotic and sordid characteristics of the letter-writer.This practice was not limited to early modern editions.Indeed, as late as the 1990s, the cover of a French edition depicts a wide-eyed nun staring at the viewer, raising her habit to expose her right nipple, pushed up by her seventeenth-century corps à baleines. 132herefore, publishers helped encourage the early modern notion that women in love were controlled by their inferior biology that led them to make irrational and immodest decisions.Mariana's reactions, her threats and her submission to her heart's desire all were characteristic of seventeenth-century Western European ideas of love and its physiological impact on the woman's body.Alerted to these themes by titles, prefaces and sequels, readers in different geographical contexts responded to the familiar tropes in the letters and the scandalous disconnect between Mariana's vocation and her actions.This led publishers to procure similar texts by women writers to capitalise on the commercial success of the Lettres portugaises.Although several of these writers subverted the model introduced by the Portuguese nun, most successfully Graffigny, the popularity of the original letter writer endured well into the twentieth century.As a result, the continued circulation of Mariana's letters encoded and recoded culturally specific ideas about women in love for almost three hundred years, readers spellbound by the passions of the Portuguese nun. 133