As irmãs de Fernando Pessoa

Abstract

In the same year that Fernando Pessoa and António Botto published the Anthology of Modern Portuguese Poems in Lisbon, Virginia Woolf published, in London, her famous book A Room of One's Own, in which Woolf reflected on what life would have been like for William Shakespeare's sister if she had existed and had revealed the same literary talent as her brother. Inspired by this speculative feminist exercise, this paper proposes that we think about what would have happened if Fernando Pessoa's three sisters (Maria Clara, Henriqueta and Madalena) had turned out to be modernist poetic geniuses like their brother. What obstacles would they have had to face? Would they have been included in Pessoa and Botto's anthology? And what consequences would their existence have for 20th century Portuguese literary and cultural history?