Senhora

"Senhora" is fiction, so we can tell the whole story, start to finish, with no worry about spoilers: that's how a novel summary works. If you'd rather discover everything on your own, reading the book fresh, stop here and come back later. But if you want a quick sense of what it's about, what the book discusses, and whether it's worth setting aside time for, go ahead without fear.

Published in 1875, when José de Alencar was already sick and near the end of his life, "Senhora" closes a cycle of his novels about women of Rio high society. It's the story of a marriage bought with money, of wounded pride that turns into cold revenge, and of two people trying to understand each other after hurting each other badly.

Aurélia starts out poor, living with her widowed mother, in love with a young man named Fernando Seixas, who seems to truly love her too. She is beautiful, proud, and has too strong a sense of dignity to silently accept humiliation, a trait that will define every decision she makes for the rest of the book.

The turning point comes when she discovers she is the granddaughter and heir of a rich grandfather she hardly knew. Overnight, the girl with no dowry becomes one of the richest women in Rio de Janeiro, with a mansion, servants, and a social standing nobody expected her to have.

This fortune changes the whole game of the novel: with money, Aurélia stops being the one who waits to be chosen and becomes the one who chooses, including choosing to buy back the very fiancé who dumped her for money. The rest of the story is about the price that choice charges her.

Seixas is a handsome, educated young man from a declining family, the kind who needs a rich marriage to keep his social status without lowering himself to work. He likes Aurélia, but he likes even more keeping up the appearance of wealth his family no longer really has.

Pressured by his mother and his own bills, he agrees to marry another girl just because she has a bigger dowry, abandoning Aurélia without much ceremony. That abandonment for money plants the seed of everything that follows: Aurélia doesn't forget, and the whole book is about her collecting on that debt.

Years later, widowed from the rich girl and sunk in debt again, Seixas turns up available on the marriage market, exactly when Aurélia has fortune to spare and a plan for settling accounts in her head.