Authors

Portuguese · 1825–1890

Camilo Castelo Branco

Camilo Castelo Branco was the most prolific and widely read Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century, whose romantic novels of passion, jealousy, and social transgression — especially Amor de Perdição (Doomed Love, 1862), written in prison while awaiting trial for adultery — are the defining works of Portuguese Romanticism. His turbulent personal life, which included imprisonment, multiple love affairs, and the suicide of one of his companions, fed directly into his fiction. He was ennobled as a viscount but died by suicide, blind and in poverty.