Romancing female identity : the influence of Jane Eyre on Portuguese women's novels

Abstract

That the novels of Charlotte Brontë were known in Portugal can be seen by the several translations of her texts into Portuguese. Jane Eyre, especially, knew several translations, some of them by renowned writers, and continues to be published in Portugal to this day. However, what I propose to do in this essay has not so much to do with the different translations of the text, but with the echoes we can find of it in the novels of Portuguese women writers of the first half of the twentieth century. To this end, I will be looking, particularly, at the echoes we can find of Jane Eyre in novels which had a somewhat didactic edge, since they were trying to put forward the image of a new, independent woman, without losing touch with the romantic tone so characteristic of women novels at the time. Jane Eyre was, in that sense, a perfect character on which to model the heroines of novels such as Alone [Sózinha] (1940) by the feminist writer Sara Beirão, which constitutes perhaps the best example of this cultural re-appropriation.