The Flame-Coloured Dress (From the Portuguese.)
by José Régio
Category: Literary Criticism

This collection of stories, Jose Regio's controversial masterpiece Historias de Mulheres, is here translated for the first time into English. Regio creates a gallery of women - women who are outsiders, born into a society in which they are constrained by class, education, money and social expectations. Dulce is the pawn of feckless guardians. Miss Olimpia is trapped by poverty and her own pretensions. Rosa, for her part, refuses to conform to the stereotype of saccharine femininity, with serious consequences for herself and for her world. Some of the women cope, others go under. A few, in unexpected ways, triumph.