Elle: com o Retrato da Auctora

by Cláudia de Campos

De regresso à sua terra natal, Cléo é confrontada com as memórias da sua infância. Tendo abandonado a vila de Sutil para concretizar estudos na capital, a viscondessa de Mello enfrenta os preconceitos de uma povoação ainda ruralizada e incapaz de aceitar o progresso da mentalidade. Numa tentativa impossível de regressar às ligações do passado, Cléo vê o seu amor idílico por Franz Lentz impedido pela sua própria condição de ter nascido mulher num Portugal conservador.
Numa obra autobiográfica, Claudia de Campos fez um retrato sobre a mulher, o seu pensamento sobre a vida conjugal e a condição feminina no século XIX. Acentuada pelo cunho verídico e controvérsia, a obra assume os locais e pessoas verdadeiras que conviviam com a própria autora, tratando-os por diferentes nomes.

Back to her birthplace, Cléo is confronted with the memories of her childhood. Having left the village of Sutil to pursuit studies in the capital, the viscountess of Mello faces the prejudices of a still ruralized village unable to accept the progress of mentality. In an impossible attempt to return to past relationships, Cléo realizes that her idyllic love for Franz Lentz is precluded by her own condition of having been born a woman in a conservative Portugal.
In this autobiographical work, Claudia de Campos made a portrait about being a woman, her thoughts on married life and the feminine condition in the 19th century. Accentuated by its veracious nature and controversy, this work treats the true places and people which coexisted with the author by different names.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

Cláudia de Campos was born in Sines on 28 January 1859. Her parents were Maria Augusta Palma de Campos and Francisco António de Campos. Her godfather and also grandfather was Jacinto José Palma, Headguard of Health of the Port of Sines.
At the age of 16 she married Joaquim D’Ornelas e Matos in 1875 of whom she separated later.
As a young women, she studied in Colégio de Mrs. Kutle in Lisbon, amongst the high society of that time, attending the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon and Literary Salons of Casino (Salões Literários do Casino).
Beyond being a writer, Campos was an intelectual innovator, an essayist of the condition of women. Some connect her irreverence, unusual literary and artistic skills to her foreign education. She used the pseudonym Colette.
Campos joined the women pacifist movements of the 1st decade of the 20th century, as well as the direction of the Feminist Section of the Portuguese League of Peace, and was vowel of the Portuguese Committee of the french association La Paix et le Désarmement par les Femmes.
In Mulheres: ensaios de psicologia feminina (Women: Essays of Feminine Psychology” she made na analysis of Charlotte Brönte, the Contess of Lafayette, Staël Baroness, Josephine de Neuville, the Queen of Romenia. She also studied Edward Thomas, Gibson, Masefield and others.

Campos made her literary debut in 1892, with the short story book Rindo… (foreword by Bulhão Pato). The freedom with which she treated certain themes and her ultra-romantic hipersensibility had a poor reception by the critics of her time.
She also published O Último Amor (1894); Mulheres: Ensaio de Psicologia Feminina (1895); A Esfinge (dedicated to Julieta Adam, 1897); Elle: Retrato com a Auctora (1899); A Baronesa de Staël (1901); O Duque de Palmela (1901).
She died of collapse in Lisbon, at the age of 56 in 1916 and left a manuscript of a study about the poet Percy B. Shelley.