The Lettres Portugaises: Scripting and selling female desire

This article builds on previous literary scholarship to analyse the social and publication history of the enormously successful Lettres portugaises (1669), five letters published in the voice of an anonymous Portuguese nun to a French officer. Although the letters were based on an ancient model, this article suggests that their references to contemporary gendered constructions of biology and love, especially for enclosed women, were successfully used by publishers to commercialise a historically recurring gender binary of heterosexual love: men were rejected and women were abandoned. The popularity of the text was such that it entrenched notions of women's helplessness in matters of the heart for almost three centuries. This article argues that the Lettres portugaises’ success was as much the result of the text's literary qualities as it was of the canny paratextual strategies deployed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publishers to sell the book, its sequels and its imitations.