For Irene Lisboa, the effects of an irregular childhood, a traumatic adolescence, and an unintentional clash with political dictatorship lingered to the end of her life. At a time when relatively few Portuguese women were writing for publication, Lisboa found in literature a vehicle for confronting the cumulative injustices that she faced from early childhood onward. She also found in poetry and prose a means for compassionately reaching out to and validating other victims of life, the normally anonymous masses, to whom she gave names and faces. In addition, she found in literature an intellectually and artistically challenging medium that she shaped to her own ends more often than not in opposition to traditional practices but in keeping with the fundamental tenets of the contemporary literary movement known as the Presença, or the second phase of Portuguese modernism.

Irene do Céu Vieira Lisboa was...