Camilo Castelo Branco
1825–1890
Biography
Camilo Castelo Branco (1825–1890) was a Portuguese novelist, playwright and essayist, born in Lisbon. Over four decades he wrote more than two hundred and fifty books, which makes him one of the most prolific writers in the Portuguese language. His private life was as eventful as his fiction. An affair with a married woman caused a public scandal and led to a spell in prison, and in later years he struggled with money troubles and failing health. He died in 1890 in the north of Portugal.
His writing sits between two currents. He kept the emotional intensity, and the love of passion and fate, of Romanticism, but he added a sceptical wit and a dark humour that gave his prose a sharp edge of its own. Much of his fiction is set in local and picturesque places he knew well, often in provincial communities. His best-known literary rival was Eça de Queirós, a younger and more cosmopolitan Realist; critics often read their rivalry as a sign of the two competing tendencies of the period. Camilo was a conservative Catholic, and his religious and political convictions show up on many of his pages.
Three of his books are in this library: A Brasileira de Prazins, A Filha do Arcediago and A Neta do Arcediago. They follow the family, honour and romance plots that made his novels so widely read in his own time, and they show the ironic eye he turned on the people around him. Read together, they are a good way into the Portuguese novel of the nineteenth century, a form he helped to shape.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
A Brasileira de Prazins
by Camilo Castelo Branco
A novel of Camilo's later years, set in the villages of the Minho in the troubled decades after the liberal revolution of 1820. It centres on a household in Prazins and the woman who has come home from Brazil, and keeps the country gossip, the priests and the political quarrels…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.A Filha do Arcediago
by Camilo Castelo Branco
The book opens in Porto in 1815 with a sweating cloth merchant, António José da Silva, pacing his shop on a stifling August day, and spreads from there into a comic story of the town's families and of the daughter of an archdeacon. An early Camilo novel, full of crowded rooms…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.A Neta do Arcediago
by Camilo Castelo Branco
The novel opens in Lisbon in February 1838, outside the São Carlos theatre, as Luís da Cunha e Faro hands a lady down from a carriage; the narrator promises to explain who each of them is. A tale of blood, inheritance and a secret family history in Camilo's romantic manner.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.A Queda d'um Anjo
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Calisto Elói de Silos e Benevides de Barbuda, a grandly spoken gentleman of a country town in the north, is elected to Parliament and goes to Lisbon. Camilo's comic satire follows the provincial innocent through the city's drawing rooms, politics and temptations, with the tone…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Agulha em Palheiro
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Camilo begins with an anecdote about the shoemaker of the poet Bocage in Lisbon in 1803 and goes on to a novel of letters and lives in the early nineteenth century. The title, a needle in a haystack, is the search at the heart of it.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Amor de Perdição: Memorias d'uma familia
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Simão Botelho and Teresa de Albuquerque, children of two feuding families in Viseu, fall in love across the street between their houses. Camilo Castelo Branco's most famous novel, told as the story of one of the author's own relatives, follows their passion against fathers…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Amor de Salvação
by Camilo Castelo Branco
A man ruined by his passion for a woman who married another is slowly drawn back towards a decent life by a love of a different kind. Camilo Castelo Branco frames the tale as a confession heard from an old friend, set in the Portugal of the mid nineteenth century.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Carlota Ângela
by Camilo Castelo Branco
In Porto in 1806 the wealthy Norberto de Meirelles and his wife watch their fortune grow along with their only daughter, who is being adorned to attract a rich husband. Camilo tells the story of the girl and the choices made for her with a narrator who jokes about how to begin.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Cenas da Foz
by Camilo Castelo Branco
In 1825 a family from Amarante comes to take the sea air at São João da Foz, bringing a mother and daughter with a great many surnames, maids, dogs and a Galician stable-hand. A comic novel of manners seen from a narrator who also lodges there.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Estrelas Funestas
by Camilo Castelo Branco
In Lisbon in 1778 a rich young nobleman of Porto, Gonçalo Malafaya, spends money for show among the court's gallants while promised since boyhood to his cousin, D. Maria das Dores. Camilo's romance of ill stars carries a family from the glitter of the capital back to its…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Estrelas Propícias
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Opening on a house by the River Lima near Viana do Castelo, half ancient and half whitewashed, Camilo tells a story of a family and a love in the Minho, under a title that promises kinder stars than those of his Estrelas Funestas.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Lágrimas Abençoadas
by Camilo Castelo Branco
The book opens at the christening of a girl nine days old, over whom the onlookers say a mysterious light shines, and her godmother is Our Lady of the Conception. It then follows her life in a long run of very short chapters in Camilo's sentimental vein.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Livro de Consolação
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Venceslau Taveira, born near Lamego in 1795, is the younger son of an entailed house and is destined by his family to be a monk. He tells the monks of Tibães that he has neither the gift nor the faith, and the novel follows what happens to a man who will not be a friar.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.Novelas do Minho
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Four novellas by Camilo Castelo Branco from the first volume of the collection: Gracejos que Matam, set in the spa of Caldas de Vizela in 1851, O Comendador, O Cego de Landim and A Morgada de Romariz. Country manners, old rivalries and sharp love stories of northern Portugal in…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Bem e o Mal
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Camilo introduces Ladislau Tibério Militão de Vila Cova, born near Pinhel in 1818, the only son of a widower who became a friar and left the boy to an uncle in the priesthood. The novel follows the education and the temptations of a man formed in a house of priests.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Esqueleto
by Camilo Castelo Branco
Between 1834 and 1839 a beautiful Frenchwoman living in a villa outside Porto with a Portuguese nobleman was the talk of the town, and no one knew where she came from. Camilo builds a dark, melodramatic mystery around the secret of her past.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Olho de Vidro
by Camilo Castelo Branco
In 1697 a physician, Francisco Luís de Abreu, moves with his wife to Coimbra hoping for a chair at the university, and they bring up a small boy, Brás, as a godson. Camilo's historical novel moves from this quiet beginning into the dangers of a Portugal where families of Jewish…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Que Fazem Mulheres
by Camilo Castelo Branco
A mother in Porto asks her daughter Ludovina if she has thought what to say to her father, who has found her a husband she has not yet seen. Camilo's philosophical romance follows the women of a middle-class household and what they do in the face of a match made for them.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Regicida
by Camilo Castelo Branco
In 1634 in Guimarães, the cutler António Leite's seventeen-year-old son Domingos refuses both his father's trade and the cloister his mother has in mind, and sets his heart on being an apothecary. Camilo's historical romance, one of his Romances Nacionaes, follows the restless…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.O Romance de um Homem Rico
by Camilo Castelo Branco
The story of Álvaro Teixeira de Macedo, born in Lisbon in 1813 to a wealthy merchant, a boy who grows up without ever having said the word mother. Camilo follows his schooling, his money and his loves in a romantic novel of feeling set against the liberal turmoil of the day.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.