Among women

Reassessing Portuguese ‘feminine’ poetry of the 1920s

Reassessing Portuguese ‘feminine’ poetry of the 1920s

Anna M. Klobucka
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Abstract

This article revisits the dramatic shift that took place in Portugal’s literary
and cultural landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century due to
the surge of published female authorship, primarily in the form of poetry. It
seeks to challenge the heteronormative assumptions that have governed the
interpretation of this archive both in canonical Portuguese literary history
and in revisionist approaches by feminist scholars of Portuguese literature.
The discussion centres on the case study of Virgínia Vitorino, the most
acclaimed female poet of the 1920s in Portugal, whose largely gender-neutral
love sonnets, read in the context of her covertly lived lesbian existence,
enable an interpretation of Vitorino as an aesthetic and political intermediary
weaving in and out of the intersecting cultures of compulsory heterosexuality
and female homosocial desire.
Keywords: Portuguese poetry, modernism, women, lesbianism, heteronorma-
tivity, Vitorino (Virgínia)

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the 1920s, a
dramatic shift in Portugal’s literary landscape was produced by a massive surge
of published female authorship, primarily though not exclusively in the form
of poetry, a sea change that has been amply documented and discussed by
critics such as João Carlos Seabra Pereira (1986), Cláudia Pazos-Alonso (1997),
Chatarina Edfeldt (2006), and Ana Paula Ferreira (2007), among others. As is
also well known, however, only one woman poet of the period, Florbela Espanca,
has attained something approximating, if not quite equaling, canonical status
in Portuguese literary history. This belated, entirely posthumous elevation of

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 19, Number 3, Winter 2019

ISSN: 1473-3536 (Print) • ISSN: 1752-2331 (Online) © Institute of Modern Languages Research 2019
https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2019.26
390 Anna M. Klobucka

Espanca’s standing from among what Hilary Owen and Pazos-Alonso name as
‘the lost or suppressed generations of women writers in the early decades of the
twentieth century’ (2011: 13) was decisively enabled by José Régio’s (1946, 1950)
and Jorge de Sena’s (1947) respective studies of her poetry, dating from the 1940s,
but it began, for all practical and symbolic purposes, with António Ferro’s editorial
article on the front page of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, published in early
1931, a few weeks after Espanca’s suicide and the release of her last and most
accomplished volume, Charneca em flor [‘Heath in Bloom’]. In this momentous
intervention, Ferro drew a qualitative line separating Espanca from the nameless
crowd of her contemporary ‘poetisas de colmeia’ [‘beehive poetesses’] as he asked
rhetorically: ‘Pois foi possível o seu anonimato […] em face de certas consagrações
vistosas, em face de certa poesia feminina de “boas festas”, reproduzida em série,
ao infinito, como os cromos das “pombinhas” e das “mãos apertadas”?’ [‘How was
it possible that she remained anonymous […] in view of some flashy acclamations,
in view of some feminine poetry in the style of greeting cards, reproduced serially,
endlessly, like the prints of “loving doves” and “clasped hands”?’] (1931: 1).
Ferro’s question, which may be read symptomatically as ushering in the
entire critical and pedagogical tradition of a wholesale dismissal of female-
authored lyric from the 1920s, buttressed by the tokenist (if still ambivalent)
embrace of Espanca as the only significant woman poet of the period, must
have appeared as doubly provocative in its own time and place. Not only was
Ferro’s wife, Fernanda de Castro, a successful poet in her own right, with four
well-received volumes published between 1919 and 1928, but the most obvious
target of his snide reference to ‘some flashy acclamations’ was the close friend
of Castro and by far the most celebrated female poet of the decade, Virgínia
Vitorino (1895–1967).1 While Ferro’s contrastive assessment has been quoted in
the context of studies tracing the long arc of Espanca’s gradually growing critical
recognition, here I intend to deploy it toward a different purpose. This purpose
consists in interrupting what Ana Paula Ferreira has described as ‘[c]ontinued
critical silence with respect to the socio-political and cultural category evoked by
the phrase “Portuguese women poets of the 20’s”’, while responding, at the same
time, to Ferreira’s call for a careful deconstruction of ‘the ready-made conceptual
image and ensuing set of cultural expectations that the critic may bring to
bear on the reading of such neglected “feminine” poetic texts’ (2007: 173). My
particular interruptive and deconstructive stance in this case relies on a queering
rereading of the lyric discourse and literary career of Vitorino in the context of
the wider scenario of women’s literary production that coincided with the heyday
of Portuguese modernism. In so doing, this essay locates itself on the intersection
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 391

of two ongoing, long-term projects: 1) foregrounding and problematizing the

multifaceted activity of female poets, artists, and intellectuals of the period in
Portugal, which has yet to be reflected in mainstream modernist scholarship; and
2) uncovering and mapping historical evidence of cultural agency by Portuguese
women who loved women.

Fame and femininity

Vitorino was born in 1895 in Alcobaça to parents who owned a general store
and a café, and moved to Lisbon at the age of nineteen in the company of
her godmother and first cousin, Virgínia Ferreira.2 Ferreira, described in an
interview by Vitorino’s great-nephew, José Guilherme Victorino, as having
‘um nível de vida bastante elevado para a época’ [‘a relatively high standard of
living for the time’], desired to encourage young Virgínia’s ‘talento formidável’
[‘formidable talent’] for both music and literature (Lopes 2009). In Lisbon,
Vitorino studied music and other subjects at the Conservatory and began
publishing her poetry in newspapers in 1917, immediately gaining a degree of
recognition. Despite her very recent debut, Nuno Catarino Cardoso included
her in his anthology Poetisas portuguesas (published in the same year of 1917)
and soon afterwards Júlio Dantas praised her lavishly in an essay entitled ‘A
musa do soneto’ [‘Muse of the sonnet’], which recounted his first meeting with
then still teenaged Vitorino and devoted at least as much space to marvelling
at her bewitching appearance – ‘uma encantadora rapariga, alta, loira, branca,
vestida com a distinção sóbria de certos tipos de inglesa’ [‘an enchanting young
woman, tall, blonde, pale, dressed […] with the sober elegance of certain types
of Englishwomen’] (Dantas 1920: 175) – as to applauding her poetic dexterity
and sensitivity. Dantas’s essay paints its subject as at once exotic and erotically
remote: his description evokes ‘estas figuras esbeltas e doiradas de spinster’ [‘these
slender and golden figures of spinsters’] along with ‘certas Virgens flamengas de
Van der Weyden’ [‘certain Flemish Virgins painted by Van der Weyden’] (176).
At the same time, he is the first, though not the last, of Vitorino’s male admirers
to insist on the conjugation of lived amorous experience with lyric performance
as an expected condition of success for women poets:

Quando Virgínia terminou a sua leitura, um pouco corada, a mão branca

de inglesa a tremer sobre o papel, confusa de ter dito em verso coisas que
seria incapaz de dizer em prosa, eu não pude deixar de pensar comigo: –
‘Que extraordinária poetisa, no dia em que amar pela primeira vez!’ (180)
392 Anna M. Klobucka

[When Virgínia finished her reading, slightly blushed, her white hand of
an Englishwoman trembling over the paper, disturbed by having said in
verse things she would be incapable of saying in prose, I could not help
thinking to myself: ‘What an extraordinary poetess she will be the day she
loves for the first time!’]

Vitorino rose to instant prominence with the launch, in early January 1921
(albeit with the official publication date of 1920), of her first volume of poetry,
Namorados [‘Sweethearts’], which sold out in six days and went on to be republished
thirteen more times until 1943, in Portugal and in Brazil. This success prompted
many profile articles and interviews with the author, in which the decorum
required in dealing with a young, ‘respectable’ woman – who cannot be asked
directly whether, for example, she has a boyfriend – came up, repeatedly and
irresistibly, against the fantasy of her love life. Vitorino, by now in her mid-twenties
and still single, would retort with ironically evasive answers – for instance replying,
when asked what kind of man she would like to marry, ‘Quando me casar se verá’
[‘When I get married, you’ll see’] (Revista ABC, 20 January 1921) – or would claim
romantic experience of an unspecified but exclusive and powerful passion as an
inspiration for her poetry: ‘Um grande amor, que aquece todos os meus versos, e
dentro do qual eu me queimo’ [‘A great love, which heats up all my verses and in
the midst of which I burn’] (Diário de Lisboa, 7 April 1922).
After Namorados, Vitorino published two more volumes of poetry –
Apaixonadamente [‘Passionately’] in 1923 and the prognostically titled Renúncia
[‘Renunciation’] in 1926 – before turning conclusively to writing for the
theatre, with six plays staged and published in the 1930s and early 1940s.3 The
tremendous early success of Namorados led journalists and critics to position
her as the dominant figure and highest standard among the still-growing
contingent of her contemporary poetisas, as the following brief selection of
quotes from book reviews of volumes of poetry by women will document.
From the review of Sedução by Olinda de Oliveira Gonçalves: ‘Mais sonetos
de amor! […] Insistimos em dizer que a arte de Virgínia Victorino proliferou’
[‘More love sonnets! […] We declare firmly that the art of Virgínia Vitorino
has proliferated’] (Ilustração Portuguesa, 10 March 1923). From the review of
Poema azul by Lucy Horta: ‘Outra poetisa influenciada pela leitura de Virgínia
Vitorino […]’ [‘Another poetess influenced by the reading of Virgínia Vitorino
(…)’] (Ilustração Portuguesa, 3 February 1923). And, most tellingly, from the
review of Florbela Espanca’s second volume of poetry, Livro de Soror Saudade
[‘Book of Sister Longing’], published in 1923:
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 393

Depois que Virgínia Vitorino se revelou com os Namorados uma das

mais perfeitas poetisas de amor […] logo uma chusma de inspiradas
meninas começou dedilhando a lira e inundando o mercado com o
fruto da sua inspiração mais ou menos feliz e da sua arte mais ou menos
adestrada. Dentre as jovens cultoras das musas que demonstram talento,
cumpre salientar Florbela Espanca […]. Se nos seus versos não há uma
originalidade que nos assombre, porque eles se ressentem de influências, e
a maior é a da poetisa dos Namorados, este Livro de Soror Saudade encerra,
todavia, coisas de inegável beleza […]. (Ilustração Portuguesa, 10 February
1923)

[After Virgínia Vitorino’s Namorados revealed her as one of the most

perfect poetesses of love (…) soon a herd of inspired girls began to pluck
the lyre and inundate the market with the products of their more or less
fortunate inspiration and their more or less skillful craft. Among the
young cultivators of the muse who show talent, Florbela Espanca is worthy
of note (…). Although her verses do not astonish with their originality
because they suffer influences, the greatest of which is that of the poetess
of Namorados, this Livro de Soror Saudade contains, nonetheless, elements
of undeniable beauty (…)]

A rare voice disagreeing with this commonly construed hierarchy of

achievement and influence among the poetisas was that of Thereza Leitão de
Barros, in the final chapter, added in 1927, of her pioneering two-volume
history of Portuguese women’s writing, Escritoras de Portugal [‘Women Writers
of Portugal’]. While refraining from a direct comparison with Vitorino, Barros
pointed to Fernanda de Castro’s poetry as ‘sem possível discussão, a mais original
e, por isso mesmo, a mais valiosa, intelectualmente, de toda a nossa literatura
poética feminina’ [‘indisputably the most original, and precisely because of this
the most intellectually valuable, of all our poetic literature by women’] (Barros
1924: 337–338). Barros was nonetheless appreciative of Vitorino’s craft, noting
her ability to translate the traditional language of the Portuguese love lyric into
the discourse of ‘uma rapariga moderna, feita à imagem e semelhança de todas
as raparigas do seu tempo’ [‘a modern young woman, made in the image and
likeness of all young women of her time’] (345). To read one of her sonnets is
to ‘ouvir falar de amor numa língua que todos entendemos, com palavras que
todos empregamos, exprimindo conceitos que a todos ocorrem, interpretando
emoções que todos experimentamos’ [‘hear love spoken of in a language we
394 Anna M. Klobucka

all understand, with words we all use, expressing ideas that come to everyone’s
mind, interpreting feelings we all experience’] (346).
Although Barros followed the Portuguese language norm in using the
masculine plural to refer to the general population of Vitorino’s readers, in effect
the vast majority of the poet’s audience was likely female, as recognized, for
example, by a reviewer (signed H.C. and identifiable as Hernâni Cidade) writing
in 1921 in the Revista da Faculdade de Letras do Porto:

O público feminino (porque ele certamente tem predominado em reclame

e compra) ama em Virgínia Vitorino o mais sincero intérprete da sua
alma. Esta poetisa não será o melhor joalheiro da sua riqueza interior. Mas
ninguém sabe engastar em mais simples filigranas de forma, mais puras e
autênticas pérolas de psicologia feminina!

[The female readership (which has certainly been predominant in buying

and promoting the book) loves in Virgínia Vitorino the most sincere
interpreter of its soul. This poetess may not be the best silversmith of her
inner wealth. But no one is able to mount in settings of more straight-
forward form purer and more authentic pearls of feminine psychology!]

In her call for a revision of critical approaches to Portuguese women’s poetry

of the 1920s, cited in the introduction to this article, Ana Paula Ferreira argues
that ‘artistic-literary performance of “femininity”’ in texts such as Espanca’s (and,
implicitly, Vitorino’s) sonnets ‘in due course cannot but invite a regression to
the traditional role of women as wives and mothers: what is, after all, “feminine
poetry” but a coded flaunting of women’s dependence on the love of men for
literary self-construction?’ (Ferreira 2007: 170). While Ferreira is entirely correct
to diagnose the ‘ideological clash’, in the Portuguese culture of the time, between
celebrations of superficially modernized yet conventionally coded femininity
and the progressive ‘ideals of organized feminism’ embodied in contrasting role
models of ‘women intellectuals and so-called new women in general’ (170–171),
I would like to propose an unsettling of her (widely if not universally shared)
critical assumption that takes for granted the orientation of Portuguese ‘feminine
poetry’ at large in the direction of ‘the love of men’. This unsettling is inspired
by Sara Ahmed’s dissection of the ‘fantasy of a natural orientation’ in the context
of her discussion of ‘becoming straight’ in Queer Phenomenology (2006: 79–92),
where orientation is seen as a technology that ‘constructs desire as a magnetic field’
and therefore implies ‘that we are drawn to certain objects and others as if by a
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 395

force of nature: so women are women insofar as they are orientated toward men
and children. The fantasy of a natural orientation is an orientation device that
organizes worlds around the form of the heterosexual couple […]’ (85; original
emphasis). My founding premise in the larger project to which this article belongs
is the removal of the presumption of ‘naturally’ heterosexual orientation from
the text and context of early-twentieth-century literary and artistic production
by women in Portugal. Aside from its localized effects at the level of individual
texts and authors, such as Vitorino, I also posit that the hermeneutic straightjacket
this presumption represents may be held responsible, to some extent, for the
continuing marginalization of pre-1950s women’s literature in Portuguese literary
history and for what Ferreira describes as the failure of traditional gynocritical
attempts to redeem it from oblivion. I would suggest that it is not the content
of the textual and cultural archive per se but the constraints imposed on it by
the fantasy of natural orientation that prevent us from perceiving and exploring
the antinormative potential inherent in what we have become accustomed to
reading (or indeed assessing without having read) as boringly and predictably
formulaic, as well as – in the context of the future political appropriation of the
‘ideology of feminine difference […] under Salazar’s Estado Novo’ (Ferreira 2007:
159–160) – as politically fossilized and irredeemable for contemporary feminism.
The enthusiastic reception, by a predominantly female readership, of the poetry
of Virgínia Vitorino – which, as I will argue, cannot in good conscience be
interpreted as orientated toward ‘the love of men’ – offers a promising case study
to crack open the critical consensus on the meaning and value of the modernist
literature of ‘feminine difference’ in Portugal.

Vitorino’s lesbian existence

In the landmark 1980 essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’,
Adrienne Rich developed her ‘feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual
orientation for women’ as a way to reframe and correct two specific sins of
patriarchal epistemology: ‘first, how and why women’s choice of women as
passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed,
invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise; and second, the virtual and total
neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings, including feminist
scholarship’ (Rich 1980: 632). Nearly forty years later, the two blind spots
denounced by Rich may be said to remain actively operative in the institution-
alized knowledge of twentieth-century Portuguese cultural history, including the
history of Portuguese modernism, with its abundant repertoire of ‘heterocentric
396 Anna M. Klobucka

assumptions’ (634), which have functioned in complicit alignment with the

long-acknowledged privileging of male literary and artistic agency to suppress
the recognition of ‘lesbian existence’ – Rich’s term for ‘both the fact of the
historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of
that existence’ (648).4
If Rich’s denunciation of lesbophobic blindness is clearly germane to the
cultural and literary-historical context of modern Portugal, her much-debated
concept of lesbian continuum, developed in the same essay, may similarly
(despite its controversial standing in Anglo-American lesbian and feminist
theory) serve as a useful tool to broaden the spectrum of vision and discourse
applicable to explorations of social and cultural agency of queer Portuguese
women, with a view to countering what Terry Castle has dubbed as the ‘scarcity
model’ of thinking about women loving women historically: ‘either there aren’t
any lesbians at all, or too few of them to matter’ (1993: 19). Castle’s remedy for
this predicament, ‘to focus on presence instead of absence, plentitude instead of
scarcity’ (19), may be taken to point in the direction of Rich’s conceptualization of
the lesbian continuum as a generously broadened ‘range […] of woman-identified
experience’ (1980: 648). Particularly in the context of widespread resistance to
lesbian identification in Portuguese culture, I would argue that Rich’s notion of
female antiheteronormative resistance as a continuum of practices and identities
can help deflect the pathologizing focus on lesbianism as sexual deviance and
facilitate the excavation and understanding of ‘many more forms of primary
intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner
life, the bonding against male tyranny, […] marriage resistance’ (648–649),
and so forth, in twentieth-century Portugal. Of course, Rich’s epistemic move
and particularly its reception and descendancy in the work of others have been
amply critiqued for their implicit deemphasizing of properly erotic lesbian desire
– what Castle names as the ‘incorrigibly lascivious surge towards the body of
another woman’ (1993: 11; original emphasis).5 These pitfalls are hardly to be
neglected in the present context, in view of such undeniable realities as the
history of lesbophobia in the Portuguese feminist movements, which well after
the Carnations Revolution could still be accused of ‘sweeping lesbian sexuality
and desire under the rug of sisterhood’ (De Lauretis 1994: 116; see Pryde 2010:
131).6 Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that Rich’s original text, even as it
sought to counter ‘limiting, clinical associations’ of lesbianism ‘in its patriarchal
definition’, battled simultaneously against what the author saw as the shrinking
of female and lesbian sexual possibility forced by setting ‘female friendship and
comradeship […] apart from the erotic’ (1980: 650). Simply put, the founding
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 397

motivation of the lesbian continuum was to eroticize a wider range of forms of

relatedness among women, and not to desexualize lesbianism.
It is with the theoretical and political beacon of Rich’s original intent in
mind that I continue this exploration of Vitorino’s life and work, which need
to be considered in the context of her lifelong refusal of any heterosexual
engagement, however fleeting, and her long-term intimate relationships with
women, of which at least two are amply documented. Considering the circum-
stance of her much-photographed, painted, and generally admired physical beauty,
along with the literary reputation as Portugal’s leading ‘poetess of love’ that she
held well into her thirties, it is indeed notable that Vitorino could not be assigned
even a single relationship with a male paramour as an alibi (commonly deployed
in the Portuguese context) for her persistent resistance to heterosexual courtship
and marriage.7 Even so, the very limited repository of critical discourse on Vitorino
remains largely inflected by the fantasy of natural orientation, as in the following
characterization of the author as ‘[i]ngénua e inexperiente […] (sê-lo-á sempre, ao
que parece, no que toca à vida amorosa, se bem que pretendentes não devam ter-lhe
rareado)’ [‘naïve and inexperienced (…) (she will always remain thus with respect to
love life, although she must not have lacked for suitors)’] (Lello 2000: n.p.).
The first and the longest of Vitorino’s relationships was with her living
companion of forty-five years, the above-mentioned Virgínia Ferreira. In a
memorial account couched in the form of a letter to Vitorino and published in
1990, several decades after both women’s deaths (Ferreira’s in 1959 and Vitorino’s
in 1967), Fernanda de Castro recalled as follows her first meeting with Vitorino
at the Lisbon Conservatory, when she was seventeen and Vitorino twenty-two:

Apresentaste-me então uma senhora que estava a teu lado, uma senhora
aloirada, magra, de olhos azuis, que me pareceu de meia idade, mas que,
pelas minhas contas, não devia de ter mas de trinta ou trinta e cinco anos.
‘É a minha madrinha e é com ela que eu vivo. Com ela e com a mãe,
irmã da minha própria mãe. Trato-a por madrinha mas é também minha
prima direita.’ (1990: 71–72)

[You introduced me then to a woman who was by your side, blondish,

slim, blue-eyed, who appeared to me then as middle-aged but who, by my
count, would have been no older than thirty or thirty-five.
‘This is my godmother, and it is with her that I live. With her and with
her mother, my own mother’s sister. I call her godmother, but she’s also
my first cousin’]
398 Anna M. Klobucka

Despite the relatively small age difference of about ten years between
Vitorino and Ferreira, and notwithstanding their horizontal kinship as first
cousins (albeit counterbalanced by their vertical connection as godmother and
goddaughter), Castro describes their companionship as a cross-age relationship,
with Ferreira as Vitorino’s caretaker and a protective and censorious mother
figure, even by the time Vitorino was at least in her mid-to-late thirties. Castro’s
recollection of her visits to Vitorino and Ferreira’s elegant apartment in Rua das
Flores (where Vitorino’s rising income allowed them to move in 1929 after
inhabiting a series of more modest lodgings) includes a portrayal of Ferreira,
who, ‘sendo de outra geração e continuando sempre um pouco provinciana,
assistia muda e às vezes reticente, aos nossos entusiasmos, às nossas explosões
de alegria, aos nossos projectos […]’ [‘being from another generation and
remaining always somewhat provincial, accompanied in silence and sometimes
with reticence our enthusiastic and joyful outbursts, our projects (…)’] (1990:
80). As a chaperone and stay-at-home companion of Vitorino, who first studied
and then worked for a living (becoming in 1927 a teacher of Portuguese,
French, and later also Italian at the Conservatory, in addition to her other
professional pursuits), Ferreira fulfilled the combined maternal and wifely
roles of caring for Vitorino’s material needs and serving as a stable provider of
emotional comfort. Such, at least, is the picture that emerges from handwritten
drafts (preserved in Vitorino’s archive in Portugal’s Biblioteca Nacional) of
several sad and deeply moving letters Vitorino composed in 1959 in response to
the condolences received from friends after Ferreira’s death:

Que importa ao mundo ‘uma madrinha’ a mais ou a menos? A mim é que

me importa, porque nela perdi uma ternura imensa, um amparo e uma
companhia na verdade insubstituíveis. Agora quem me espera quando, ao
fim do meu dia, entro em casa? E quem vai perguntar-me com um sorriso:
‘então que fez hoje, conte lá?’ (Letter to Beatriz Pina, 15 October 1959)

[What matters to the world one ‘godmother’ more or less? She matters
to me because with her I lost an immensity of tenderness, support, and
companionship that are truly irreplaceable. Who will now wait for me
when I arrive home at the end of the day? And who will ask me, with a
smile, ‘so what have you done today, do tell?’]

Vitorino’s letter drafts make palpable the difficulty of verbalizing her mourning
for a lifelong companion whose place in her life seems nonetheless undefinable
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 399

in the terms made available by the strictures of heteropatriarchal kinship and

conjugality. For instance, the following much-emended and incomplete sentence
ends up fully crossed out: ‘É que, na verdade [variant “realmente”], não se vive
com uma pessoa [variants “alguém”, “ninguém”] uma vida inteira, sem se receber,
ao perdê-la, num momento destes, um choque brutal, tanto mais que, neste caso,
a pessoa’ [‘It’s that, in truth (variant “in reality”), one doesn’t live one’s entire life
with a person (variants “with someone”, “with anyone”) without experiencing,
in a moment like this, a brutal shock, and the more so because, in this case, the
person’] (Letter to Maria Luísa Teixeira, 2 October 1959). Following Ferreira’s
death, and suffering from multiple ailments, Vitorino largely retired from Lisbon
to Caldas da Rainha, where she stayed with and was cared for by another close
friend, Manuela Lima de Carvalho (Lopes 2006). She never returned to the
apartment she and Ferreira had shared (and she still owned) in Rua das Flores,
choosing to lodge during her visits to Lisbon in the nearby Hotel Borges, where
she died on 21 December 1967.
The second of Vitorino’s consequential and lasting attachments was to
her (also older) friend Olga de Morais Sarmento (1881–1948), who, unlike
Ferreira, did not remain stationary in Portugal; although a frequent visitor to
Lisbon, from 1914 onward she resided primarily in Paris. There she became a
lifelong companion of the fabulously wealthy baroness Hélène van Zuylen, born
Rothschild, whose earlier relationship with the ‘new Sappho’ Renée Vivien had
made her a prominent (albeit reviled) member of the famed Parisian lesbian
milieu of the early twentieth century.8 Sarmento and Vitorino, who likely met
through common friends in Lisbon (poet Branca de Gonta Colaço, for example,
was close to both women), became regular travelling and vacationing partners
throughout the 1920s and 30s; as Vitorino’s great-nephew relates it, ‘Ela fazia
essas viagens […] durante o Verão. Olga Morais Sarmento tinha uma casa em
Paris, outra em Hendaya, elas saíam daqui no Sud Express e ficavam lá uns meses’
[‘She took those trips (…) in the summer. Olga Morais Sarmento had a home in
Paris, another in Hendaya, they would leave here on the Sud Express train and
stay there a few months’] (Lopes 2009). Their travels encompassed as well more
far-flung locations across southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East
(Marinho and Ordorica 1998: 26–37), seemingly coming to a definitive halt
only with the outbreak of World War II and Sarmento and van Zuylen’s escape
from France.9 An uncommonly candid glimpse into the erotic complicity of
Sarmento and Vitorino’s relationship may be found in the memoir of Portuguese
actress Beatriz Costa, who recounted the two women’s visit to her dressing room
in a Lisbon theatre (likely sometime in the mid- to late 1920s):
400 Anna M. Klobucka

Olga de Morais Sarmento viveu a maior parte da sua vida em França.

Um dia apareceu no Teatro Variedades de Lisboa acompanhada da
encantadora Virgínia Vitorino. Entrou no meu camarim, passou-me a mão
na cintura e sentou-me nos joelhos. Eu era muito jovem e não sabia quem
era aquela senhora de chapéu panamá. Disse-me coisas muito agradáveis.
Elogiou-me os olhos, o sorriso e como pouco mais viu digno de elogios
passou a desejar-me um futuro risonho. Virgínia ria e apertava aqueles
olhinhos verdes e expressivos. (1975: 204)

[Olga de Morais Sarmento lived most of her life in France. One day she
showed up at the Teatro Variedades in Lisbon in the company of the
charming Virgínia Vitorino. She came into my dressing room, put her
arm around my waist, and sat me on her knees. I was very young and
didn’t know who this lady in a panama hat was. She told me very nice
things. She praised my eyes and smile, and as she saw little else that might
be praiseworthy, she went on to wish me a radiant future. Virgínia was
laughing and scrunching up those green and expressive eyes of hers]

The first of the many trips abroad Vitorino and Sarmento took together, in
1921, is documented in several articles by Vitorino in Diário de Lisboa, written
in the form of letters to a probably fictional female friend (‘Minha querida
Isabel’ [‘My dear Isabel’]) under the conventional heading of ‘impressões de
viagem’ [‘travel impressions’]. The eight-day sea voyage from Lisbon took
Vitorino to Naples, where she was met by Sarmento and within hours whisked
away to Capri, clearly a priority destination on their itinerary and deserving of a
Diário de Lisboa piece of its own, titled ‘Os tipos e a paisagem de Capri’ [‘Capri’s
human types and landscape’] and subtitled ‘Um chá em casa de Romaine
Brooks’ [‘Tea in the home of Romaine Brooks’] (Vitorino 1922: 3).10 Although
few original readers of this dispatch would have been sufficiently well informed
to realize this, Vitorino’s ‘Capri types’, subsumed by the collective descriptor of
‘multidão elegante e cosmopolita’ [‘elegant and cosmopolitan crowd’], consisted
mainly of several lesbian women, with initial emphasis given to a monocle-
wearing Russian princess accompanied by ‘uma doutora […] que entendeu no
seu dever masculinizar-se, na toilette, nas atitudes, no cachimbo de marinheiro
inglês que adoptou’ [‘an intellectual (…) who felt it necessary to masculinize
herself through her wardrobe, her behaviour, the English sailor’s pipe she took
up’]. But the article’s most sustained attention goes to painter Romaine Brooks,
author of iconic portraits of modernist lesbian celebrities, among them pianist
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 401

Renata Borgatti and Radclyffe Hall’s partner Una Troubridge. After dining with
Olga and Virgínia at their hotel and ‘horas de encantadora conversa’ [‘hours of
enchanting conversation’], Brooks invited them to a party at her home of Villa
Cercola, where Borgatti played piano with Olga Rudge on the violin. While
previously the Russian doutora’s masculine ways drew Vitorino’s ironic scorn,
Brooks’s stylistic eccentricity merits nothing but admiration in her report:
‘Calçavam-lhe os pés, sem meias, umas sandálias de ermitão; mas de ermitão
que se desse ao luxo de gastar na Rue de la Paix […]’ [‘Her feet were clad in
hermit’s sandals, without stockings; but the kind of hermit who could afford the
luxury of shopping in Rue de la Paix (…)’]. Vitorino’s discriminating assessment
of lesbian sartorial alternatives merits some commentary, relating as it does to her
own adoption of a carefully cultivated ‘feminine’ style, albeit with a modernizing
twist, in poetry as much as in personal appearance. The contrasting values she
ascribes to the juxtaposition of the objectionable butch persona of the unnamed
Russian with the impeccable elegance of Brooks’s expensive Greek-style sandals
may thus be aligned with the ‘ideological clash’ (Ferreira 2007: 170) between
the champions of traditional femininity and the emancipated ‘new women’
(as is signalled in particular by Vitorino’s snarky reference to the Russian as a
‘doutora’) in the Portuguese culture of the time. It is worth observing as well
that, while all but explicitly outing the Russian couple as lesbians, Vitorino
hastened to assure her Diário de Lisboa readers that Brooks possessed a husband,
‘o mais afável dos americanos’ [‘the most debonair of Americans’], in a nod to
heteropatriarchal normativity potentially destabilized by other elements of her
narrative.11
Vitorino’s own personal style appears to have been balanced, not unlike
her projected image of Brooks, between her milieu’s conventional standards of
heterosexual femininity and a more adventurous self-fashioning, signalled in
Brooks’s case by her bare sandalled legs and in Vitorino’s, most prominently,
by her early adoption of a short hairstyle. Having become ill with typhus in
the late 1910s, she was shorn of her long hair and upon recovering decided
not to let it grow back to its original length, despite Ferreira’s objections. As
Castro recalls in her posthumous letter to Vitorino, around that time ‘surgiu
em Paris a moda do cabelo à garçonne e por esta razão, a tua madrinha queria
por força esconder a tua cabeça encaracolada num gorro, numa boina, ou num
chapelinho qualquer. E dizia-te para se justificar: “Não quero que digam que
foste a primeira mulher em Portugal a usar o cabelo à garçonne. Parece mal”’
[‘the fashionable à garçonne haircut appeared in Paris, and for this reason your
godmother insisted on hiding your head covered in short curls under a cap,
402 Anna M. Klobucka

beret, or any kind of hat. And she would tell you, to justify herself, “I don’t
want people saying that you were the first woman in Portugal to wear your
hair à garçonne. It doesn’t seem proper”’] (Castro 1990: 74). At the height of
her literary fame, Vitorino’s cultivated style drew considerable attention, as
documented, for instance, by the following recollection of her public image
in an anonymous obituary note: ‘Quando Virgínia Vitorino descia ou subia
o Chiado, alta, loira, bonita, de gabardine beige e de botas de cano alto, que,
longe de a masculinizarem, a tornavam mais feminina ainda, toda a gente
a cortejava’ [‘When Virgínia Vitorino strolled up or down the Chiado, tall,
blonde, pretty, in a beige trench coat and tall riding boots, which, far from
masculinizing her, made her even more feminine, everyone would be courting
her’] (‘Virgínia Vitorino’ 1968: 14). Notable both in this statement and in the
negotiation of Vitorino’s hairstyle is the care invested in shielding her from
the threat of improper – to put it bluntly, lesbian – identification: if her short
hair could be hidden and/or blamed on bed-confining illness (until becoming
normalized due to its wide adoption by Portuguese women in the 1920s), the
meaning of her trench coat and boots – acknowledged as potentially readable
as masculine – could be turned around to accentuate instead her superlative
femininity. Also worth observing is the anonymous obituarist’s use of the
gender-neutral expression ‘toda a gente’ [‘everyone’] in referring to the collective
of Vitorino’s desiring admirers, implicitly as likely to be female as male. It is
to such slyly ambiguous play with gender and orientation, which can also be
discerned in Vitorino’s poetry and in the realm of its reception and circulation,
that I turn in the last section of this article.

‘Words we all use’

One of firmly established critical beliefs about the defining features of early
twentieth-century Portuguese poetry by women has been its thematic focus
on love, modulated by an allegedly uniform and schematic heteronormative
perspective, with the preeminent position attributed to the male love object
(and a small number of poems by Judith Teixeira a transgressive exception that
confirms the rule).12 To take this conviction entirely for granted, however, belies
the verifiable materiality and pervasiveness of female homosocial transactions
occurring in the environment in which this poetry was produced, performed
in literary salons, and circulated in the publishing market. The Lisbon salons,
a gender-inclusive alternative to the all-male literary gatherings that took place
in the famed modernist cafés A Brasileira and Martinho da Arcada, were hosted
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 403

by socially prominent women such as Veva de Lima, Elisa de Sousa Pedroso,

Clarinha (Carlota de Serpa Pinto), Branca de Gonta Colaço, and Madalena
Martel-Patrício, among others (Castro 1988: 133). Female writers and artists
assembled also in more informal private contexts, such as Fernanda de Castro’s
home when she was a recently married young mother, as she relates in one of
her posthumous letters to Vitorino, recalling regular gatherings that brought
together the likes of Thereza Leitão de Barros (author of Escritoras de Portugal),
painter Sarah Afonso, and Vitorino herself (Castro 1990: 77).
Feminist and lesbian historians have long pointed to institutions and social
structures relying on gender segregation – such as convents, girls’ schools,
polygynous households, and so on – as conducive to the emergence of same-sex
affective bonds, often eroticized, occasionally sexual, among their female
populations (Rupp 2009: 162–193). Shouldn’t the comparatively segregated
sphere of 1920s Portuguese poetry by women for women also be considered
a potentially fertile breeding ground for the forging of such bonds? Some
documentary evidence suggests that the hypothesis of institutionalized female
homosociality spilling over into lesbian homoeroticism – along the lines suggested
by Rich’s concept of lesbian continuum – was not absent from the minds of
those most directly concerned with producing and promoting this literary
output. As Pazos-Alonso has documented in her study of Florbela Espanca, the
poet’s relationship with the magazine Modas e Bordados, the women’s supplement
of the newspaper O Século, where she began to publish in 1916, was of particular
importance to her literary development, as was also doubtlessly true of many
other aspiring female poets who submitted their verses to Modas e Bordados.13
Having seen a number of her poems favourably received and published in the
magazine throughout 1916, Espanca also had to contend with a rejection, which
was announced in print in the section ‘A correspondência das nossas leitoras’
[‘Correspondence with our readers’] on 4 October. The note stated that one of
the two sonnets Espanca had submitted ‘será publicado, o que não pode suceder
ao outro – incaracterístico, se o considerarmos da autoria duma senhora e se
atentarmos em que fala de paixão amorosa apesar de ser dedicado a uma senhora
também’ [‘will be published, which cannot happen with the other – nonchar-
acteristic, if we consider that it is authored by a lady and if we observe that it
speaks of amorous passion despite being dedicated to another lady’] (quoted in
Pazos-Alonso 1997: 243).
The injunction issued to Espanca by Modas e Bordados illustrates to perfection
Judith Butler’s discussion of ‘the mundane psychic and performative practices by
which heterosexualized genders form themselves through the renunciation of
404 Anna M. Klobucka

the possibility of homosexuality, a foreclosure which produces a field of hetero-

sexual objects at the same time that it produces a domain of those whom it
would be impossible to love’ (1993: 25). In the dynamically evolving discursive
field of gendered representations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Portugal, homosexual identities and same-sex relations became prominently
visible and indeed speakable for the most part precisely through the multiple
instances of the affirmation of their impossibility and unspeakability, such as
the act of policing presented above. When considered in the context of the
abundant emergence of female-authored lyric, composed overwhelmingly in the
form of love poetry and reproduced to a significant although not exclusive extent
in gender-segregated publishing environments such as Modas e Bordados, the
particular technology of gender that consists in the enforcement of compulsory
heterosexuality acquires obvious relevance.
A very similar gesture of (self-)censorship may be located as well in Vitorino’s
lyric oeuvre. The final poem in Namorados, ‘Toujours la même chose’ [‘It’s always
the same’], which is addressed to a former beloved of unspecified gender, was
on its original publication (in the newspaper Século da Noite, on 17 November
1917) dedicated to ‘senhora D. Adelia Heinz’, Vitorino’s piano teacher at the
Lisbon Conservatory.14 The sonnet’s first stanza traces a melancholy scenario of
an unfulfilled amorous passion (Vitorino 1920: 95):

Mas o que houve entre nós, tudo acabou.

A nossa história é fácil de contar.
– Beijo que morre e não se chega a dar,
rosa que murcha e nunca se esfolhou.

[But all there was between us is over now.

Our story is easy to tell.
– A kiss that dies before it is given,
a rose that wilts before it could blossom]

On the poem’s integration in Vitorino’s first published collection, the dedication

to Adélia Heinz was removed, facilitating the sonnet’s seamless inscription into
the narrative of a relationship between the ‘namorados’ of the volume’s title,
who, although largely disembodied and rarely gendered (on which more below),
are nonetheless linguistically marked as a heterosexual couple, given that one
member of the duo is implied to be the speaking female subject of Namorados.15
The work of heteronormative passing performed in this instance by the masculine
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 405

plural may be viewed in parallel with Barros’s similarly ideologized use of the
same grammatical device in Escritoras de Portugal to describe Vitorino’s love
discourse as composed ‘numa língua que todos entendemos, com palavras que
todos empregamos, exprimindo conceitos que a todos ocorrem, interpretando
emoções que todos experimentamos’ (1924: 346; emphasis added). If Barros’s
representation of Vitorino’s ‘words we all use’ as expressing ‘emotions we all
experience’ is most obviously interpretable as seeking to centre and mainstream
what her book’s subtitle names as ‘génio feminino revelado na literatura
portuguesa’ [‘female genius revealed in Portuguese literature’], it is also readable
as producing a continuum of all-encompassing relatability in which readers of all
genders and orientations are able to see their own experience of love mirrored in
Vitorino’s welcomingly ecumenical lyric discourse.
How does the entirety of Vitorino’s published poetry fit into this reading,
then? To be sure, there are no poems in Namorados, Apaixonadamente, or
Renúncia that overtly display the gender of the poet’s beloved as female. At the
same time, however, of the forty-five sonnets in Namorados only twelve identify
the love object as male, if rather perfunctorily, without any materially concrete
elaboration, while in Apaixonadamente and in Renúncia the love discourse is
entirely gender-neutral, without a single exception. I choose to postpone a
comprehensive close reading of these volumes to another occasion, however, in
order to allow for the inclusion in this discussion of some pertinent archival
artefacts, the first of which illuminates how Vitorino’s not-quite-lesbian poetry
served as a vehicle of affective communication between women that was clearly
energized by a shared drive toward antiheteronormative disidentification. The
women, in this case, were friends and lovers Francine Benoît (1894–1990),
French-born Portuguese composer and musicologist, and Suzanne Laurens
(1904–2003), French sculptor who studied art in Lisbon and Porto (Braga 2013:
79). Among their extensive correspondence, preserved in Benoît’s archive in
Portugal’s Biblioteca Nacional, one letter from Laurens (dated 22 January 1928)
refers to the artist’s passing acquaintance of Vitorino, in an apparent response
to a question or information conveyed in a previous letter from Benoît.16
Laurens confesses to feeling somewhat negatively impressed by Vitorino when
she saw her twice in France in the early 1920s, finding her ‘un peu infatuée
d’elle même’ [‘a little infatuated with herself ’], but states she changed her mind
when Benoît later made her read Vitorino’s sonnets, one of which Benoît also
put to music. The sonnet in question, ‘Renúncia’ – published in the literary
magazine Contemporânea in 1924 and later integrated in the eponymous
volume – conveys a melancholy message of unfulfilled possibility, similar to
406 Anna M. Klobucka

that of ‘Toujours la même chose’, albeit more definitive and encompassing in its
emotional scope (Vitorino 1926: 85–86):

Fui nova, mas fui triste; só eu sei

como passou por mim a mocidade!
Cantar era o dever da minha edade…
Devia ter cantado, e não cantei!

Fui bella. Fui amada. E desprezei…

Não quiz beber o phyltro da anciedade.
Amar era o destino, a claridade…
Devia ter amado, e não amei!

[I was young but sad; only I know

how youth has passed me by!
To sing was the duty of my age…
I should have sung but sing I didn’t!

I was beautiful and loved. And I disdained…

I refused to drink the potion of distress.
To love was the duty, the lightness…
I should have loved but love I didn’t!]

Vitorino’s ‘Renúncia’ may certainly be read – and probably was read by many at
the time of its publication and beyond – as belonging squarely and formulaically
among the many neo-Romantic poetic glosses of the orthodox Portuguese affect
of saudade that were cultivated by both male and female writers of the early
twentieth century. But the emphasis placed on the poem in Laurens and Benoît’s
correspondence, as well as Benoît’s choice to compose a musical score for it, hint
at a different kind of reception on the part of the sonnet’s queer readers, who
might have found themselves emotionally attuned to its themes of the impossi-
bility of loving and expressing love and the resulting predicament of existential
desolation.
The prominence of ‘Renúncia’ in Vitorino’s oeuvre – given its publication in
Contemporânea and subsequent placement as the final poem of her last collection
– contrasts with the obscurity of another of her sonnets, whose quite distinct
aesthetic suggests how differently the author’s talent might have developed under
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 407

less restrictive conditions of discursive possibility. Published in 1917 in several

provincial periodicals, the poem was nonetheless excluded from Vitorino’s debut
volume Namorados (unlike, for example, ‘Incerteza’, her very first published
poem from the same year, which ended up included in the collection):17

A Freira
Era a freira mais linda do mosteiro.
– Dizia-o a sorrir o capelão. –
Mas ninguém descobria que razão
A levara a fugir do mundo inteiro.

Dizia-se em segredo que um troveiro

Vinha cantar-lhe em trovas a paixão;
Que ela deixara longe o coração
Nos olhos de algum belo cavaleiro.

Foi a freira espreitada. E na verdade,

Horas mortas, desceu, toda ansiedade,
À cerca do convento. Noite clara.
..........................
Quase manhã, ela beijava ainda
Uma rosa vermelha, muito linda,
Que alguém, num grande beijo, lhe deixara.

[The Nun
She was the prettiest nun in the convent.
– The chaplain would say with a smile. –
But no one could discover what reason
Had led her to flee the entire world.

It was said in secret that a troubadour

Came to sing to her the songs of his passion;
That she had left her heart far behind
In the eyes of some handsome chevalier.

The nun was spied on. And in truth,

In the dead hours she stepped down,
408 Anna M. Klobucka

All anxious, to the convent’s wall. Bright night.

..........................
Almost at dawn, she was kissing still
A crimson rose, very beautiful,
That someone, in a big kiss, left with her]

In what reads on first approach as a pleasantly playful but also banal lyric
exercise, my admittedly partial critical lens detects some tantalizing queering
lines of flight that would turn out, lamentably, to be left unpursued for the
most part in Vitorino’s later work. Picking up on the time-honored Portuguese
theme of monastic eroticism, the sonnet rehearses established heteroerotic scripts
(a poet’s love object, a doomed affair) as circulating explanations for the nun’s
withdrawal from the world – attempting to peek into her closet, so to speak.
Then, instead of a conclusive revelation, comes the teasing off-camera gap and
sexy finale, couched in what is irresistibly readable as lesbian erotic imagery,
which nonetheless remains safely ensconced in generic trappings of amorous
passion, epistemically framed as heteronormative by the reliably hegemonic
fantasy of natural orientation. The poem’s seductive yet furtive appropriation
remains thus encased in a solid scaffolding of plausible deniability, while still
allowing for a significant degree of hermeneutic openness to the mind of a
sufficiently motivated reader.
In his slim history of Portuguese lesbianism, Filhas de Safo (2012), Paulo
Drummond Braga names Vitorino as one of two ‘escritoras alegadamente lésbicas’
[‘allegedly lesbian writers’] (98) in early-twentieth-century Portugal (the other is
Alice Moderno). While Vitorino’s (as well as Moderno’s) lived lesbian existence
should be considered a historical fact, perhaps even greater value may be located in
regarding her as an aesthetic and political intermediary weaving in and out of the
intersecting cultures of compulsory heterosexuality and female homosocial desire.
I would argue that the secret of Vitorino’s success may have resided precisely in her
ability to bend the conventions of love lyric into expressions of affect and desire
applicable equally to heterosexual romance and to same-sex intimacy between
women. In the first volume of his edition of Camões’s lyric poetry, published
in 1923, Agostinho de Campos explained the difficulty of attracting contem-
porary readers to the Renaissance poet’s love sonnets by evoking the imperative
of mirroring each generation’s amorous experience ‘na língua palpitante do seu
tempo’ [‘in the vibrating language of its time’], the reason why every epoch has its
own poets: ‘Neste sentido foi Camões facilmente desbancado por muitos outros
poetas no decorrer dos séculos, como no século passado e no actual Soares de
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 409

Passos o foi por João de Deus, e João de Deus por D. Virgínia Victorino’ [‘In this
sense, Camões was easily displaced by many other poets throughout the centuries,
just as in the last century and in ours Soares de Passos was dislodged by João de
Deus, and João de Deus by D. Virgínia Victorino’] (Campos 1923: xxxii). In
the effervescent cultural cauldron of the Portuguese 1920s, side by side with the
violent polemic of ‘Literatura de Sodoma’, which agitated Portuguese society and
intellectual milieus in the early years of the decade, Vitorino’s enormously popular
poetry may also have channelled the period’s Zeitgeist in ways we are only now
beginning to understand more completely.

Notes
1 The spelling of the author’s last name – Vitorino or Victorino – varied in her own
lifetime and remains inconsistent today. In this article, I follow the spelling
established in the Portuguese national bibliographic database, PORBASE,
while preserving the original spelling in quoted sources.
2 For a detailed chronology of Vitorino’s life and publications, see Marinho and
Ordorica (1998): 23–39.
3 I am unable to integrate a discussion of Vitorino’s plays in the limited space of this
article. For a comprehensive presentation and analysis of her writing for the
theatre, see Lello (2004).
4 See the chapter on lesbianism in Portugal from the 1920s to the 1970s, tellingly
entitled ‘“Mas isso existe?”’ [‘“But this exists?”’], in São José Almeida’s book
Homossexuais no Estado Novo (Almeida 2010: 101–124).
5 As Sharon Marcus summarizes this complicated legacy, ‘The concept of a lesbian
continuum, once a powerful means of drawing attention to overlooked bonds
between women, has ironically obscured everything that female friendship and
lesbianism did not share and hidden the important differences between female
friends and female lovers’ (2007: 29).
6 Shortly after publishing ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’, Rich herself recognized that
her concept of ‘lesbian continuum’ was yielding itself to a use ‘by women who
have not yet begun to examine the privileges and solipsisms of heterosexuality,
as a safe way to describe their felt connections with women, without having
to share in the risks and threats of lesbian existence. What I had thought
to delineate rather complexly as a continuum has begun to sound more like
“life-style shopping”’ (1986: 73).
7 An illustrative contrasting example is the case of Alice Moderno (1867–1946),
whose biographer acknowledges Moderno’s relationship with Maria Evelina de
Sousa, which lasted at least forty years (with the two women living together
and dying within eight days of each other), only in the briefest section of a
subchapter dedicated to Moderno’s ‘amigos vários micaelenses’ [‘various friends
410 Anna M. Klobucka

in São Miguel’] (Vilhena 1987: 147), while dedicating much greater attention
to her subject’s only (early and brief) heterosexual relationship with Joaquim de
Araújo, described as ‘o grande amor na […] vida [de Alice Moderno]’ [‘the great
love of Alice Moderno’s life’] (156).
8 On Vivien and van Zuylen, see Rubin (2011): 103–105. Sarmento remained
with van Zuylen for over thirty years, fleeing with her to Lisbon ahead of the
impending German invasion in 1940, then accompanying her to New York
(where the rest of van Zuylen’s family took refuge), and finally back to Lisbon,
where the baroness died in 1947 and Sarmento herself died a year later. For
more on Sarmento, see Almeida (2010): 116–118 and Curopos (2011).
9 Sarmento also used her extensive international connections to promote Vitorino
as a poet outside of Portugal, as documented, for instance, in a 1922 article
in Paris-Notícias, which states that ‘Mlle Virginia Vitorino est une jeune
poétesse portugaise qui a conquis en son pays, rapidement, une grande
notoriété. Mme de Moraes Sarmento, l’illustre femme des lettres qui habite
Paris depuis longtemps, nous disait, en nous envoyant quelques sonnets de sa
compatriote: “Jamais il ne fut au Portugal un plus grand talent féminin”’ [‘Miss
Virginia Vitorino is a young Portuguese poet who has quickly conquered great
recognition in her country. Mrs de Moraes Sarmento, the illustrious woman of
letters who has been a longstanding resident of Paris, told us when sending us a
few sonnets by her compatriot: “There has never been a greater female talent in
Portugal”’] (‘Une poétesse portugaise’). On the network of literary connections
Vitorino developed across Iberia, see Sánchez-Élez (2011).
10 On Capri as a gay and lesbian destination in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see Aldrich (1993): 125–135. For additional details of
Vitorino’s journey as recounted in her Diário de Lisboa articles, see Curopos
(2016).
11 The husband, John Ellingham Brooks, was not an American but one of a number
of gay Englishmen who moved to Capri in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1895
trial, attracted by Italy’s legalization of homosexuality (Aldrich 1993: 126).
By 1921, he and Romaine had been separated for many years, which means
that Vitorino was either poorly informed or, more likely, emphasizing Brooks’s
ex-husband’s presence at her party as a heteronormative alibi.
12 Teixeira, the only female Portuguese poet before the 1950s who published some
explicitly homoerotic verse, has in recent years become the subject of a growing
body of scholarship. For a succinct assessment of her place in Portuguese
modernism, see Pazos-Alonso (2011).
13 As Espanca wrote in 1916 to Júlia Alves, the magazine’s assistant director, ‘o
seu jornal só com cem páginas por semana poderia conter a porção de coisas
boas e más que metade das mulheres de Portugal para lá envia numa febre
de escritoras, literatas, poetisas e cozinheiras’ [‘your paper would need one
hundred pages each week to contain a fraction of the good and bad things that
Reassessing Portuguese ‘ feminine’ poetry of the 1920s 411

half of the women in Portugal send you in a feverish zeal of writers, litterateurs,
poetesses, and cooks’] (Espanca 1986: 129).
14 It was Adélia Heinz who introduced Fernanda de Castro to Vitorino, also in
1917 (Castro 1990: 71). In Castro’s account, Heinz’s last name is misspelled as
‘Heintz’.
15 In the absence of any documented justification of the dedication’s removal, it
is possible to speculate that it was prompted by Vitorino’s extreme circum-
spection, which must have only intensified when she herself sought to become a
teacher at the Conservatory, failing at first in 1923 and then succeeding in 1927
(Marinho and Ordorica 1998: 26–29), and, coincidentally or not, abandoning
poetry as her chosen genre of literary expression after 1926.
16 I am deeply grateful to Helena Lopes Braga for sharing with me her transcription
of Laurens’s letter and for the crucial insights I was able to gain more generally
from her groundbreaking research.
17 ‘A Freira’ was published in 1917 in Semana Alcobacense (Alcobaça, 26 August),
Democracia do Sul (Évora, 30 August), and Notícias de Alcobaça (28 October).

Works cited
Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham,
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Anna M. Klobucka is Professor of Portuguese and Women’s and Gender Studies

at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She is the author of The Portuguese
Nun: Formation of a National Myth (2000; Portuguese translation 2006), O Formato
Mulher: A Emergência da Autoria Feminina na Poesia Portuguesa (2009), and O
Mundo Gay de António Botto (2018). She has coedited After the Revolution: Twenty
414 Anna M. Klobucka

Years of Portuguese Literature 1974–1994 (with Helena Kaufman, 1997), Embodying

Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality (with Mark Sabine, 2007; Portuguese edition
2010), and Gender, Empire and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections (with
Hilary Owen, 2014). Her most recent book project focuses on mapping cultural
agency and relationality of queer-identified women on the margins of canonical
Portuguese modernism.