A Illustre Casa de Ramires

Eça de Queirós

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz or Queirós (European Portuguese: [ˈɛsɐ ðɨ kɐjˈɾɔʃ]; 25 November 1845 – 16 August 1900) was a Portuguese author, journalist and diplomat. Born in northern Portugal, he earned a law degree from the University of Coimbra before being appointed a local administrative official in Leiria, the town that would later serve as the setting of his breakthrough novel in the realist style, The Crime of Father Amaro. He then embarked on a diplomatic career as Portuguese consul in Havana, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol and Paris, where he died in 1900, aged 54. The beginnings of his literary career are inextricably linked to his role as a leading member of the Generation of '70, alongside such figures as Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins, a group of young radical intellectuals committed to artistic reform who denounced late Portuguese Romanticism as outmoded and intellectually barren. Eça's works, modelled on French Realism and Zola's scientifically minded naturalist school, chronicle his country's cultural decline and ennui during the last decades of the Portuguese monarchy. They are often satirical in tone, inasmuch as they are set against the backdrop of, and…