The Siege of Clarice Lispector

In 1949, Clarice Lispector found herself in a bit of a funk, despite the effusive acclaim surrounding her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, six years earlier. After the difficulty she’d faced getting her second novel, The Chandelier, published in 1946, her attempt to find a publisher for her third novel, , was proving no easier. The publisher of had rejected it, and so had many of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious publishing housesHow was it that an author who had revolutionized Portuguese writing several years earlier, whose debut novel was praised as “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language” suddenly couldn’t get her name in print? ’s translation into English would be even more arduous—it is only arriving now, in 2019, seventy years after its initial publication and forty-two years after its author’s death.