Eça de Queirós

Novelist committed to social reform who introduced Naturalism and Realism to Portugal. He is often considered to be the greatest Portuguese novelist, certainly the leading 19th-century Portuguese novelist whose fame was international. The son of a prominent magistrate, Eça de Queiroz spent his early years with relatives and was sent to boarding school at the age of five. After receiving his degree in law in 1866 from the University of Coimbra, where he read widely French, he settled in Lisbon. There his father, who had since married Eça de Queiroz' mother, made up for past neglect by helping the young man make a start in the legal profession. Eça de Queiroz' real interest lay in literature, however, and soon his short stories - ironic, fantastic, macabre, and often gratuitously shocking - and essays on a wide variety of subjects began to appear in the "Gazeta de Portugal". By 1871 he had become closely associated with a group of rebellious Portuguese intellectuals committed to social and artistic reform and known as the Generation of '70. Eça de Queiroz gave one of a series of lectures sponsored by the group in which he denounced contemporary Portuguese literature as unoriginal and hypocritical. He served as consul, first in Havana (1872-74), then in England, UK - in Newcastle upon Tyne (1874-79) and in Bristol (1879-88). During this time he wrote the novels for which he is best remembered, attempting to bring about social reform in Portugal through literature by exposing wha…