The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun

These letters were first published anonymously in 1669. Ostensibly they were translations into French of five love letters written by a nun, cloistered in a provincial Portuguese convent, to a French officer who had loved her and left her. More than a hundred years later the nun was identified as Mariana Alfocorado, a gentlewoman who had lived in the Franciscan convent of Beja. The officer was thought to be No l Bouton de Chamilly who went to Portugal in 1663 to support the Portuguese in their war against the Spanish. Recently scholars have identified the author as the Vicomte de Guilleragues, a nobleman at Louis XIV's court, who wrote them as a literary exercise. The letters display a remarkable psychological insight into the mind of a woman in love, attesting to a slow but crucial development of self-awareness and a beautifully controlled treatment of passion on the edge of hysteria.