11 - Eça de Queirós: A European Writer

Summary

José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) was among the most cosmopolitan men of his time. He went on the Eastern Grand Tour, taking in Egypt, where he witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), and the Holy Land (like Disraeli, Nerval and Gautier). In 1873 he travelled to the USA (Philadelphia, New York and Chicago) and Canada. His professional life as consul first took him to La Habana (1872–74), then Newcastle (1874–78) and Bristol (1878–88). His last post was Paris, where he died in 1900.

Having lived abroad, mostly in England and France, for most of his adult life, Eça knew European culture well. Although his readership was Portuguese and Brazilian, and despite the fact that he portrays Portuguese bourgeois and aristocratic society in his novels, he also engages with late nineteenth-century European cultural, aesthetic and political debates and shows concern about the role of Portugal in Europe. The crisis of Naturalism, fin-de-siècle fears of cultural and racial decline, the imperial question, reflections on science and progress, and on the debate between culture and nature, are just some of the topics he has in common with European writers of his time. Well-read and well-travelled, with the advantage of having reached maturity as a novelist while living in Victorian England, he was in a privileged position to acquire a broad European view of events and cultural changes.

Critical evaluation of Eça de Queirós's fictional and non-fictional works has often tended to suffer from political bias. He has been appropriated by both the Left and the Right: critics on the Left have celebrated his early novels, especially O Crime do Padre Amaro (1880; translated as The Crime of Father Amaro) and O Primo Basílio (1878; translated as Cousin Basílio), for their social and political concerns, while those on the Right praised him highly for what they deemed to be the nationalism of A Cidade e as Serras (1901; translated as The City and the Mountains) and A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (1900; translated as The Illustrious House of Ramires). Biographical criticism has underpinned some of these interpretations, by establishing a link between his marriage in 1886, at the age of forty, to Emília Resende, an aristocrat from Northern Portugal, and his later writings.