ELEONORA AND JOSEPH. Julieta Almeida Rodrigues
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Praise for Eleonora and Joseph
Eleonora and Joseph "Following the strong tradition of Portuguese female writers, novelist Julieta Almeida Rodrigues brings to Eleonora and Joseph her experience of both the 1974 revolution in Portugal and her life in diplomatic circles around the world. The life of Joseph Correia da Serra has been the subject of biographies in Portuguese, while his contacts with Thomas Jefferson deserve to be explored in English. In addition, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel's narration from prison is a striking frame from which to foreground issues of passion, patriarchy, inequality, slavery, and struggles for female independence. A must read of imaginary lives in European and American intellectual circles at the end of the 18th century!"
—Kenneth David Jackson, Professor of Portuguese, Yale University
"Like Plutarch, Julieta Almeida Rodrigues gives us a book tuned into two voices. She aptly brings to light the much-neglected Southern European Enlightenment, adding the irresistible Thomas Jefferson to plot and discussions. The social and moral issues that fall under scrutiny in this historical novel are well worth contemplating, and debating, in the twenty-first century."
—José Sasportes, Portuguese Writer and Former Minister of Culture of Portugal
Eleonora and Joseph. Two distinct lives with parallel destinies, portrayed with literary and sociological imagination by Julieta Almeida Rodrigues. Lives that plunge us into Les Lumierès, the French Revolution, and the apocalyptic events that followed. Thomas Jefferson gives this well-conceived story its beginning and its end. He introduces us to the lure of a century that glorified freedom without abolishing slavery, and that proclaimed equality without eliminating privilege. Remarkably, this is also a story about human nature and the unchanging ways of the world."
—José Luis Cardoso. Research Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, The University of Lisbon; and Fellow, Lisbon Academy of Sciences
"With a historian's gift for dogged research and a writer's eye for detail, Julieta Almeida Rodrigues brings to life the trajectories of two colorful eighteenth century characters, Eleanora Fonseca Pimentel and Joseph Correia da Serra. Lovers of historical fiction will enjoy their separate but entwined stories as they play out against the crumbling Neapolitan Republic."
—Novelist Helene Stapinski. Author of Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy
Eleanora and Joseph is an imaginative novel of the intersecting narratives of two intriguing historical figures whose lives span the Old World and the New, and the Age of Enlightenment as it explodes into the Age of Revolution. Novelist and scholar Julieta Almeida Rodrigues draws on her own wide-ranging background in Europe and America to draw a sympathetic portrait of two brilliant Portuguese characters. Eleonora is a poet and revolutionary, Joseph a conflicted man navigating a career in the church, botany and diplomacy. The personal and intellectual drama of Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel and Joseph Correia da Serra plays out amidst the revolutions sweeping Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the intellectual oasis of Jefferson’s Monticello whose master’s own internal contradictions presage the war that would later engulf America as well. An absorbing tale of passion, clashing ideals, guilt and devotion.
—Ambassador Laura Kennedy
This historical novel uses three keys to open one door, a door that offers readers access to a world of cultural treasures and political contradictions at the end of the eighteenth century in both Europe and America. Julieta Almeida Rodrigues juxtaposes opposites in this story of passion and revolution: beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, refinement and ignorance, liberalism and despotism. Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, a gifted aristocrat, becomes a leading revolutionary in Naples, an unusual role for a woman in her day. Joseph Correia da Serra, a diplomat and internationally recognized naturalist, struggles with ambition and what is right. Rodrigues’s erudition steers the reader through the conflicts of the past that currently inform our present. The ill-fated love between Eleonora and Joseph reflects the many moral issues of our contemporary world. Thomas Jefferson, a former president of the United States, owner of plantations and slaves, plays a prominent role in this story as a liberal intellectual whose domestic life we come to understand.
There is a jewel in this novel, delicate and stoic at the same time. It is the Madre Superiore, the Reverend Mother, in charge of the female section of the Vicaria prison where Eleonora becomes imprisoned for her political activity. A feminist avant la lettre, she professes a gender ideology before her times. Compassionate, she touches the reader in tantalizing ways.
Rodrigues’s novel is a page turner—I was glued to the pages from beginning to end.
—Amadeu Lopes Sabino, Portuguese writer
Eleonora and Joseph. An enticing take on the Enlightenment set in eighteenth century Naples and the newly minted United States, as seen through the lens of two powerful historical figures: doomed revolutionary poet, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel and Abbè Joseph Correia da Serra, artfully re-imagined as star-crossed lovers. Thomas Jefferson, debating ideas with Correia in Monticello, is a wonderful part of this story.
—Novelist Hope C. Tarr w/a Hope Carey
In Eleonora and Joseph, Julieta Almeida Rodrigues shows vividly how politics and culture join hands to illustrate the eighteenth century’s illustrious lives that she both captures and celebrates. Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was in no way inferior to the two eminent male characters in this story: Joseph Correia da Serra and Thomas Jefferson. With a masterful literary approach, Rodrigues addresses the bonds of long-lasting love that tied two adolescents—Eleonora and Joseph—who lived in Bourbon Naples. With an exceptional literary imagination, Rodrigues opens our horizons to the contrasting and diverging feminine and masculine worlds of the era. By sharing on a first-person basis the vicissitudes and dilemmas of the protagonists, readers experience their story as if present on the scene and readily take sides on the exchanges skillfully depicted. Parallel to Eleanora and Joseph’s story is a passionate portrait of Thomas Jefferson’s way of life. Here, the author details not only Jefferson’s family’s domestic life on the Monticello plantation, but also his illicit relationship with a younger black slave with whom he fathered a number of children.
Eleonora and Joseph is a compelling read for both European and American audiences, the story’s action taking place on both continents. The narrative offers a heightened sensibility that subtly reflects on history, femininity, and the love of nature. The distant eighteenth century comes up close for our enjoyment and serves as an omen of the gender issues and achievements of the future.
—Zília Osório de Castro, Professor (ret), Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, The New University of Lisbon, member of the Portuguese Academy of History, and Founder and Director of the literary magazine, Faces of Eva
Eleonora and Joseph
Passion, Tragedy, and Revolution in the Age of Enlightenment
A Novel
Julieta Almeida Rodrigues

Washington, DC
Copyright © 2019 by Julieta Almeida Rodrigues
New Academia Publishing, 2020
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