The book's publication and banning, its subsequent stage adaptations, and the international outcry over the arrest of the authors, revealed to the world the existence of extremely discriminatory dictatorial repression and the power of the Catholic patriarchy in Portugal.
[1][2][3] They began to meet twice weekly in Lisbon,[4] publicly for lunch and privately for dinner,[5][6] in order to "examine the problems they shared as women and as liberal writers.
"[5] A volume of poetry by Horta had recently been banned, and they intended their new work as a direct challenge to the censors,[7] and also, one critic has written, as "an incitement to insurrection, based on the conviction that "when woman rebels against man, nothing remains unchanged" ([NPL p.] 158).
[8] Some academic studies attempted to determine the authorship of the various texts that compose the book by comparison with their individually authored literary works.
[8] Others respected their decision and rationale: "They call their process of writing, their final product, and their relationship a trialectic in order to disrupt all dichotomies, all binary oppositions that .. are so often exploited to define and circumscribe woman, desire, discourse.
[7] A campaign of protests against the detention of the three Marias was discussed at the first International Feminist Planning Conference, sponsored by the National Organization for Women, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 1973.
[13] Protests were held on the date the trial of the three Marias was scheduled to begin, July 3, 1973,[14] in the US,[15][16] France,[15][16] Italy,[15][16] England,[15][16] Belgium,[16] Finland[16] and Japan,[15] as well as in Portugal[15] and Brazil.
[17][18][19] Following the coup of April 25, 1974 which ended the dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano, the trial was terminated and the authors pardoned,[4] with the judge declaring the book "of outstanding literary merit".
"[22] A 2006 Portuguese study describes it as "um palimpsesto, na medida em que a sua superfície esconde níveis de significação mais profundos" (a palimpsest, in which its surface hides deeper levels of signification);[1] others have called it "a post-modern collage of fiction, personal letters, poetry, and erotica".
[9] The New York Times reviewer found the book "tedious",[8] saying "part of the trouble is that these three modern Marias are as obsessed with love as poor Soror Mariana.
One of the main interests of the book, as literature, resides precisely in this ever-shifting identity of the subject, ... constantly changing while the predicate remains essentially unchanged.
[1] Women began to talk about their bodies, about the pleasures and sufferings of their sexual relationship with men, and they shocked Portuguese society on account of that.
"[2] Linda S. Kauffman, a feminist literary theory scholar, challenges these perceptions, saying "The writing is a process of searching for the law of their own desires.
"[3] New Portuguese Letters (or excerpts from it) had public readings on stage and radio, during the trial of its authors and after it was published in translation, in several countries including the US, UK and France.