This study describes and analyzes cultural and literary mythology
surrounding the figure of the seventeenth-century nun Mariana Alcoforado
as the presumed author of the celebrated collection of love letters that
originally appeared in 1669 in French under the title of Lettres
portugaises. Ostensibly written by a nun cloistered in a provincial
Portuguese convent to her departed lover, an officer in the French army,
they are now generally reputed to have been a literary, fake authored by
a seventeenth-century French writer.