The Lettres portugaises : Scripting and selling female desire

Journal article


O'Leary, Jessica. (2022). The Lettres portugaises : Scripting and selling female desire. Gender and History. pp. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12670
AuthorsO'Leary, Jessica
Abstract

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.

Year2022
JournalGender and History
Journal citationpp. 1-17
PublisherJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd
ISSN1468-0424
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12670
Scopus EID2-s2.0-85143435431
Web address (URL)https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0424.12670
Open accessPublished as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
Research or scholarlyResearch
Page range1-17
FunderAustralian Research Council (ARC)
Publisher's version
License
File Access Level
Open
Output statusPublished
Publication dates
Online25 Nov 2022
Publication process dates
Accepted05 Oct 2022
Deposited17 Jul 2023
ARC Funded ResearchThis output has been funded, wholly or partially, under the Australian Research Council Act 2001
Grant IDDP1092592
Additional information

© 2022 The Authors. Gender & History published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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