The Love Letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a 17th Century Nun

The Love Letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a 17th Century Nun

This article relates to Room on the Sea

In the final novella of Room on the Sea, Aciman has Mariana, a student and scholar, relive her ill-fated love affair with Itamar, a womanizing painter also staying at the Italian Academy, by writing him a letter. In fact, this story is a reimagining of a story of another Mariana, one with a centuries-old literary precedent: Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, who was long thought to be the author of a set of "Portuguese Letters."

Alcoforado was baptized in 1640 in Beja, Portugal, and came from a wealthy and land-owning family. When she was a teenager in 1656, she entered the local convent of Nôtre Dame de la Conception. (This was to ensure her safety during a conflict with Spain that began in 1640.)

Here, the ambiguous fact and fiction of "Mariana" begin to mix. Purportedly, when Mariana was twenty-five, she spotted a twenty-nine-year-old French military officer passing beneath her convent window, a site now known as the janela de Mértola (the "window of Mértola") for its panoramic view of the nearby village. This man was Noël Bouton, who later became the Marquis de Chamilly, and he was in Beja for the Portuguese Restoration War. They began a love affair, but with the end of the war and rumors of their liaison threatening scandal, Bouton suddenly abandoned Alcoforado and returned to France.

Devastated, Mariana wrote a series of letters to Bouton heartbreakingly detailing their romance, five of which were published in France in 1669 as "Les Lettres Portugaises" or the "Portuguese Letters." These letters, published anonymously in French, were claimed to be a direct translation of lost originals. Initially accepted as authentic, they were immediately a hit in France for their depiction of a clandestine, forbidden affair involving an unknown nun and for the author's confessional, touching writing style.

But the truth of these letters' authorship has proven to be somewhat convoluted. In 1810, the specific name "Mariana" was attached to them for the first time, when a scholar claimed to have a copy of the originals; before then, their anonymous author had always been known simply as "the Portuguese nun from Beja." More research confirmed that a nun named "Maria Ana Alcoforado" had lived in 1660s Beja, and so she was presumed the author—until new evidence surfaced in 1926 that the real author was Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, aka "Guilleragues," the original French "translator," that he had fabricated the story behind the letters, and that they are entirely fictional. Most contemporary scholars now accept that Guilleragues holds complete authorship over the "Portuguese letters," although some are still convinced that Alcoforado was, indeed, their true creator. Regardless of Mariana's authorial veracity, the "Portuguese letters" have left an undeniable legacy to literature and the Portuguese cultural imagination, including influencing writers such as Stendhal and Rilke.

The first page of the first edition of Les Lettres Portugaises. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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This article relates to Room on the Sea. It first ran in the July 30, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.