Ana Hatherly's extensive production in both literature and the plastic arts is characterized by a strong sense of the poetic and by elements of the baroque. Great attention to form, wordplay, and the doubling of images are aspects of the artistic style in her fiction, which is dominated by themes of the drama and pain of human existence, language and writing as signifying processes, and writing as a questioning of and search for the truth. The author's particular preference for baroque literature is also seen in her many critical studies and editions of Portuguese writers of that period.

Hatherly was born Ana Maria de Lourdes Rocha Alves on 15 June 1929 in Porto to Celeste Rocha Pereira and Jaime C. Alves, but she moved to Lisbon in her youth and has lived there since then. In 1952 she married a British subject, Henry Mário Frank Hatherly, who died in...