Relendo M. Delly: personagens, enredos, crítica

Abstract

M. Delly was the pseudonym of Jeanne Marie Petitjean de la Rosière, a devoted French catholic born in 1875. With collaboration from her brother Frédéric Henri, she published about a hundred novels in the first half of the 20th century. Her love stories were a success with the public in Europe and in Brazil, and they were translated and published until the 1990s. In Brazil, her books were either imported from Portugal or published by the Biblioteca das Moças ("Young Ladies' Library"), and they were recommended by schools and by the Church. Currently, Delly's novels are criticized, mainly because of the conception of the woman's role presented in them and because of their repetitive plots. In this dissertation, Delly is partially vindicated by means of the comparison of some aspects of her work characters, plots, descriptions of the society with those of 19th century authors such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.