The Three Marias     by Rachel de Queiroz, Translated by Fred P. Ellison Original title: As Tres Marias Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Univ of Texas Pr Pub. Date: March 1985 Format: Paperback Dimensions: 0.50 x 9.25 x 6.00 in. ISBN: 0292780796 List Price: $11.95, £11.35 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £11.35 Published by Texas UP Pub. Date: 1963 Pub. Place: USA Format: 178 pages Not available for ordering

Rachel de Queiroz was born in 1910 in the interior of the North-Eastern state of Ceará and grew up on her family’s ranch in the depths of the sertão (the wild backlands), whose landscape and lifestyle are depicted vividly in her work. Her books have a strong sociological content, presenting the trials and tribulations of man’s struggle against nature in the unforgiving sertão, but from a distinctly female point of view, focusing on the role of women in this very male-oriented and almost feudal environment of powerful landowners, isolated ranches and overworked peasants. She presents the roles that are acceptable to women, and how limited and controlled they are, and she also shows how those who rebel against the norm are punished, ostracized, or regarded as criminal or even insane. She has received critical acclaim and great popularity within her country and in 1977 she was the first woman elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Queiroz attended a strict convent school in the state capital Fortaleza, undoubtedly the model for the setting of her fourth novel The Three Marias (1939). The Marias of the title are Maria Augusta, or ‘Guta’ (the narrator), Maria José and Maria Glória, three very different characters who were best friends in the convent. The novel tells the story of their school days and then of what happened to each of them when they left, comparing them before and after their emergence into the wider world. Guta has great expectations of life: she wants a career, she hopes to find true love, she longs to travel and have adventures and she is determined to escape from the role of housewife and mother that an unforgiving and moralistic society and a strict Catholic upbringing prescribed for women. She tries constantly to understand the opposite sex and empathises with misfits and rebels who do not conform to society’s expectations.

Queiroz’s narrator is a close observer of social types and sensitive to body language, with an eye for the beautiful and the ridiculous. Using an uncomplicated style, in the tone of a diary or a conversation between close friends, the narrator confides in the reader, telling of her hopes and dreams, impressions and disappointments and her determination to to strive for independence and fulfillment, despite society’s restrictions and reactions.

I was eighteen when I started to work, and six months later I had already started to fear getting old without ever knowing what the world was all about.

The world — my thirst for it was great. Not for pleasures, or rather, not solely for pleasures. My soul was like that of the soldier in the folktale of Pedro Malasarte who abandons everything, sets out with his knapsack on his shoulder, experiences hunger and persecutions, walks covered with dust and weariness through strange cities governed by cruel and crafty kings, all plotting his downfall. He, however, a slave to his desire to ‘see,’ to ‘know,’ confronts all things, continues eternally in search of the impossible surprise, of things never seen, journeying always ahead, beneath the sun and through peril.

I felt I was like him, that the two of us were brother and sister, the soldier and I, and I was his sister who stayed behind, who could not accompany him, and who held out her arms to him and wept. 69