Eca's English Letters
Solemn, grand, vulnerable – and a little absurd: England in the 1880s. The gentry endures tedious country-bound winter weeks (fashion forbids them from showing their faces in London). Lord Beaconsfield is mourned, and a national legend buried. "The Times" remains the gruff voice of a postprandial Establishment which has just made a meal of the whole world and put its feet on the fender, warming its gout. Abroad, John Bull is sweet reason; Irish rebels must not incommode English land-lords; Egyptian rebels must learn to respect their established rulers...
Meanwhile, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a young consul, Eca de Queiros, writes regular letters to his Brazilian readers, giving a dry, amused, not wholly impartial account of these and other English activities. His facts can get a shade garbled, his irony verges on the cruel: he describes people, places and events in a vigorous, lively way, blowing stylish raspberries at venerable institutions. The Times is especially comic. A corrective to the British propaganda of the period and to the rhetoric of Great Britain Plc, Eca's "English Letters" provides timeless amusement from its vantage-point in history, a vision of Victorian Britain less eminently civilised than it thought itself to be.
To Ann Stevens' celebrated translations of the Letters, this edition adds further letters, passages from the Cronicas de Londres and Notas Contemporaneas not previously translated.
About the Author
Eca de Queiros was born in 1845 at Povoa de Varzim in northern Portugal, the son of a magistrate. After studying law, he travelled widely and entered the diplomatic service. Married, and with four children, Eca was known as a genial host, a raconteur, wit, dandy, aesthete and bon viveur. He served as consul in Havana, Bristol and Paris, where he died in 1900.
Eca's travel articles, essays and short stories first brought him to the notice of the Portuguese literary establishment. His early novels, "The Crime of Father Amaro" (1876) and "Cousin Bazilio" (1878), won him recognition as a writer of European stature. While Eca's most significant literary influence was the French naturalist tradition of Flaubert, Balzac and Zola, his novels have their own distinctive voice: urbane, exact, amused and ironic. Eca's exposure of the greed, pretensions and hypocrisies of his society is tempered by a warm sympathy for human frailty and a poignant sense of the fragility of happiness. His enjoyment of everyday life and his sense of the unpredictability of individual destiny give his novels an enduring immediacy.
