By 1967, Clarice Lispector was more a legend than a presence. She didn’t do book signings or TV interviews and was rarely seen in literary circles. In contrast to the frenzy of praise garnered by her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published twenty-five years earlier, her books were now ignored or met with incomprehension. She was famous yet somehow forgotten and was facing considerable financial and physical hardship as a result of a fire in her apartment, which had left her badly burned. When the editor of the Jornal do Brasil, Brazil’s most prestigious newspaper, offered her the job of writing a crônica, a weekly column, it was partly motivated by sympathy.

Lispector had prior journalistic experience – in her twenties she’d worked for the national wire service – but her previous columns were ‘women’s pages’ written under a variety of pseudonyms. In one she told readers, ‘Don’t mix real jewels with fake ones. And try not to overdo it … You’re not a jeweler’s window, and you’re not the Virgin of Pilar.’ One column was ghostwritten for the actress Ilka Soares; another was covertly sponsored by Pond’s face creams. Writing a crônica on a weekly basis, and under her own name, was an entirely different proposition. But, she confessed, ‘I need money. The position of a myth is not very comfortable.’

Despite this, her first column begins with a refusal: ‘No, I can’t. I simply can’t bring myself to think about the scene I imagined.’ For the rest of the paragraph, she describes a child too hungry to sleep being furiously scolded by his mother. After both sink into