Leaving home one summer’s evening in 1971, Maria Teresa Horta noticed a car was following her. She had recently published a volume of poetry, “Minha Senhora de Mim” (“My Lady of Myself”), which reflected on female sexual pleasure. Portugal’s dictatorial regime, led by Marcello Caetano, did not approve. The goons in the car confronted Ms Horta, warning her not to write such smut again. The beating they administered put her in hospital.
A few days later she turned up to lunch with two friends and fellow writers. They were appalled. “God, if a single woman has something like that happen to her because of a book of poetry,” Maria Velho da Costa said, “imagine if the three of us wrote a novel.” Ms Horta was enthusiastic about the idea; the third woman, Maria Isabel Barreno, was more cautious. Yet when they next met, Barreno had begun the book.
For nine months the three convened every week to exchange work. The result was more ambitious and strange than a novel: a mix of poems, letters and essays inspired by “Letters of a Portuguese Nun”, a 17th century epistolary story in which a Franciscan nun addresses her French former lover and describes being held in a convent against her will. The authors felt this was an apt metaphor for women’s lives in modern Portugal. “What woman is not a nun, sacrificed, selfsacrificing, without a life of her own, sequestered from the world?” they wrote. “What change has there been in the life of women through the centuries?”
They called the book “New Portuguese Letters” and, seeing it as a joint endeavour,
did not identify their contributions. Using a sometimes bewildering cast of characters, they comment on the subjugation of women in the home, misogynist laws, sexual and domestic violence, abortion, the Catholic church and the colonial wars Portugal was waging in Africa. They anticipated a backlash, but “the machismo of the Portuguese had to be made clear,” says Ms Horta, now 85. “It was a macho country that gagged women. It was a country that wanted us to obey the rules and customs that had been in place for decades.”
“New Portuguese Letters” was published 50 years ago, in 1972. Tipped off by the printers, the government acted swiftly. It banned the book, seizing copies on the grounds that the text was “irreparably pornographic and incompatible with public morality”. Copies already sold circulated on the black market. The women were questioned, charged with abusing the freedom of the press, then released on bail. A trial was set for 1973. The country’s media were not permitted to report on the case. But word of the women’s persecution, and the stifling of free speech in Portugal, got out. A friend of Barreno smuggled copies of the book into France and sent them to feminist writers including Christiane Rochefort, who publicised the case.
French newspapers published excerpts of the text, which was shared among women’s liberation groups. In Britain authors including Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Jean Rhys wrote to the Times expressing their disgust with the trio’s treatment. At the International Feminist Planning Conference held in Massachusetts in June 1973, representatives of dozens of countries agreed to rally round the “Three Marias”.
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Leaving home one summer’s evening in 1971, Maria Teresa Horta noticed a car was following her. She had recently published a volume of poetry, “Minha Senhora de Mim” (“My Lady of Myself”), which reflected on female sexual pleasure. Portugal’s dictatorial regime, led by Marcello Caetano, did not approve. The goons in the car confronted Ms Horta, warning her not to write such smut again. The beating they administered put her in hospital.
A few days later she turned up to lunch with two friends and fellow writers. They were appalled. “God, if a single woman has something like that happen to her because of a book of poetry,” Maria Velho da Costa said, “imagine if the three of us wrote a novel.” Ms Horta was enthusiastic about the idea; the third woman, Maria Isabel Barreno, was more cautious. Yet when they next met, Barreno had begun the book.
For nine months the three convened every week to exchange work. The result was more ambitious and strange than a novel: a mix of poems, letters and essays inspired by “Letters of a Portuguese Nun”, a 17th century epistolary story in which a Franciscan nun addresses her French former lover and describes being held in a convent against her will. The authors felt this was an apt metaphor for women’s lives in modern Portugal. “What woman is not a nun, sacrificed, selfsacrificing, without a life of her own, sequestered from the world?” they wrote. “What change has there been in the life of women through the centuries?”
They called the book “New Portuguese Letters” and, seeing it as a joint endeavour,
did not identify their contributions. Using a sometimes bewildering cast of characters, they comment on the subjugation of women in the home, misogynist laws, sexual and domestic violence, abortion, the Catholic church and the colonial wars Portugal was waging in Africa. They anticipated a backlash, but “the machismo of the Portuguese had to be made clear,” says Ms Horta, now 85. “It was a macho country that gagged women. It was a country that wanted us to obey the rules and customs that had been in place for decades.”
“New Portuguese Letters” was published 50 years ago, in 1972. Tipped off by the printers, the government acted swiftly. It banned the book, seizing copies on the grounds that the text was “irreparably pornographic and incompatible with public morality”. Copies already sold circulated on the black market. The women were questioned, charged with abusing the freedom of the press, then released on bail. A trial was set for 1973. The country’s media were not permitted to report on the case. But word of the women’s persecution, and the stifling of free speech in Portugal, got out. A friend of Barreno smuggled copies of the book into France and sent them to feminist writers including Christiane Rochefort, who publicised the case.
French newspapers published excerpts of the text, which was shared among women’s liberation groups. In Britain authors including Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Jean Rhys wrote to the Times expressing their disgust with the trio’s treatment. At the International Feminist Planning Conference held in Massachusetts in June 1973, representatives of dozens of countries agreed to rally round the “Three Marias”.