Cartas de Inglaterra ("Letters from England") is a collection of journalism by the 19th-century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz. He worked in the Portuguese consular service and was stationed at Newcastle upon Tyne from late 1874 until April 1879; from then until 1888 he was at Bristol. During this period he published O Primo Basílio ("Cousin Bazilio") and Os Maias ("The Maias"), but he was also writing occasional London letters for the Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias. Some of these afterwards appeared in book form as Cartas de Inglaterra. The collection was published in English in 1970 as Letters from England with a translation by Ann Stevens. Six of the letters from this book were subsequently published, together with many other letters written by Eça when he lived in the United Kingdom, as Eça's English Letters, with additional translations by Alison Aiken.

Outline of Cartas de Inglaterra

In its final published form Cartas de Inglaterra includes the following chapters:

Eça de Queiroz and the English

Eça, a cosmopolitan widely read in English literature, had no admiration for English society or the British Empire, though he was fascinated by them. This bitter sketch of the British in their Empire comes from the six-article series Os ingleses no Egipto, "The English in Egypt": What a strange people! For them it is a matter of certainty that no one can be moral without reading the Bible; no one can be strong without playing cricket; no one can be a gentleman without being English. And this is what makes them hated. They never blend; they never become un-English ... The Englishman falls on foreign ideas and customs as a block of granite falls on water. There he stays, with his Bible, his clubs, his sports, his prejudices, his etiquette, his self-centredness ... Even in countries where he has lived for hundreds of years, he is still the foreigner.