CAMILO CASTELO BRANCO (1847-74)

One of the major literary figures of the 19th-century Portugal, master of the Portuguese language, and author of 58 novels ranging in kind from Romantic melodramas to works of Realism.

Born out of wedlock into a family believed to have had a hereditary tendency to insanity, Camilo was orphaned in childhood and brought up by relatives in the austere and primitive Trás-os-Montes region of northern Portugal.

Allowed to grow up undisciplined and proud, he studied irregularly at Porto, first medicine, later for the priesthood, but eventually abandoned these professions for a literary career.

For a time he wrote Gothic tales such as Mysterios de Lisboa (1854) and Livro Negro do Padre Diniz (1855), until he arrived at his mature style with Onde Está a Felicidade? (1856) and Vingança (1858; "Revenge").

Living as intensely as he wrote he engaged in a series of love affairs culminating in his elopement with Ana Plácido, the wife of a Porto businessman. The two lovers were imprisoned for adultery (1861), during which time Camilo wrote in two weeks his best known work, Amor de Perdiçâo (1862; "Fatal Love"), the story of a love thwarted by family opposition that eventually led the hero to crime and exile. It is the typical expression of the view of life with which Castelo Branco came to be indentified -a view in which passion is the irresistible force and social prejudice the immovable object, their collision often resulting in tragedy, sin, and redemption through suffering.

In 1864, after his release from prison and the death of Ana Plácido´s husband, Castelo Branco settled with Ana in the village of Seide in the Minho region, where he supported himself by the sale of his works. He wrote unceasingly, producing verse of indifferent quality, plays, works of erudition, and hard-hiting polemical writings. He continued to pour out novels of unequal merit, many wtitten to order for publishers. 

In 1885 he was awarded the title of viscount of Correia Botelho. A few years later, despondent over his son´s insanity and his own ill health and impending blindness, he committed suicide.

Though many of Castelo Branco´s works are on the level of popular serials, others, sucha as Amor de Perdiçâo, O Romance d´un Homem Rico (1861), and O Retrato de Ricardina (1868; "Portrait of Ricardina"), have a tragic quality and are narrated with conciseness and vigour. Overall, his novels mirror the domestic and social life of a transitory age in Portuguese society in which a decaying nobility was slipping under the heel of a victorious middle class. Though his popular following was among the middle class, the undependable Camilo often caricatured them viciously, singling out for special ridicule those Portuguese who were newly enriched by fortunes made in Brazil.

Outliving the Romantic era, Castelo Branco remained a Romantic by temperament and conviction. Though the objective pictures of Minho rural life in his Novellas do Minho (1875-77) approach Naturalism, he engaged in a literary quarrel with the emergent Naturalist school and parodied their style and subjects in Eusébio Macário (1879) and A Corja (!880; "The Rabble"). Nevertheless, while continuing to express vehement opposition to Naturalism, he more and more closely assimilated its descriptive objectivity and verisimilitude.