A Mother-In-Law's Book

A bold, unsettling, and darkly witty novel from one of Brazil's great nineteenth-century masters.
First published in 1896, A Mother-in-Law's Book is one of Aluísio de Azevedo's most provocative and least conventional works. At first glance, it appears to be a domestic comedy about the most feared figure in family life: the mother-in-law. But beneath its ironic surface lies a daring psychological novel about marriage, desire, motherhood, social convention, and the impossible search for lasting happiness.
When a bachelor narrator visits his old friend Leandro, he expects to hear the usual complaints about Leandro's tyrannical mother-in-law. Instead, he finds a man who reveres her memory. The explanation lies in a mysterious manuscript left behind by Olympia, a fiercely intelligent woman who devoted her life to protecting her daughter from the disappointments of ordinary marriage.
Through Olympia's voice, Azevedo constructs a startling critique of domestic life, exposing the tensions between love and habit, passion and respect, freedom and social respectability. Equal parts satire, confession, philosophical argument, and psychological drama, A Mother-in-Law's Book reveals a forgotten side of Brazilian Naturalism: intimate, ironic, uncomfortable, and astonishingly modern.
This edition presents the novel in English translation, with an introduction, afterword, and translator's notes designed to guide contemporary readers through its cultural, historical, and linguistic context.