The Divorcée

Porto, 1880. Ermelinda Silva has been taught to recognise love by its fashionable signs: elegant clothes, poetry, music, jealous friends, and a handsome admirer. Alberto supplies them all. Beneath the performance, however, he is an idle gambler whose charm conceals debt, fraud, infidelity, and cruelty.

Marriage turns Ermelinda's romantic education into a trap. As her household collapses and violence escalates, she seeks what her society calls "divorce"-only to discover that the law can separate her from her husband without making her free, while respectable friends who once pitied her now shrink from the scandal of a divorced woman.

First published in 1881, José Augusto Vieira's The Divorcée is a sharp, darkly comic novel of marriage, money, social hypocrisy, and the dangerous education of desire. Moving from glittering drawing rooms to the humiliations of legal separation, it brings Belle Époque Porto to life through vivid caricature, psychological observation, and naturalist detail.

This edition presents the complete novel in fluent literary English, together with original editorial material that explains its legal, historical, and cultural background.