Tales and Fantasies

A rediscovered Portuguese classic of feeling, irony, and moral imagination.

Tales and Fantasies brings together the fiction and literary essays of Maria Amalia Vaz de Carvalho, one of the most remarkable Portuguese women writers of the nineteenth century. In these stories, drawing rooms, country houses, convent shadows, family secrets, disappointed loves, and quiet acts of sacrifice become the stage for a penetrating study of human character.

With a style at once elegant, observant, and deeply humane, Vaz de Carvalho examines the inner lives of women, children, servants, aristocrats, intellectuals, and social outsiders. Her fiction moves between tenderness and satire, domestic intimacy and moral drama, revealing a world in which reputation, class, education, marriage, faith, and money shape every destiny.

This revised English edition also includes the book's second part: a series of literary and historical essays on European and American figures such as Balzac, Lincoln, Grant, and Victor Hugo's daughters. Together, the stories and essays reveal the range of an author who was not only a storyteller, but also a critic, educator, and sharp observer of her century.

Ideal for readers of classic European literature, women's writing, nineteenth-century fiction, Portuguese literature, and literary rediscoveries, Tales and Fantasies restores to English-language readers a voice of rare intelligence and emotional depth.