Introducing Eça de Queiroz is an awkward task. In Portugal, Brazil, and generally in the Portuguese-speaking world, he is far too famous to need an introduction. In the rest of the world his name raises, at best, a polite eyebrow. He would not have himself cared much for such extremes. As all great artists, he deserves to be accepted as part of everyone's heritage, a familiar figure to the lowly and the mighty alike, as indeed the man was in his lifetime, who believed that widespread education and an acceptance of modern science might produce a better world for everyone.

His statue in downtown Lisbon is not a famous landmark. It shows a gentleman with a monocle, draping an allusive veil upon the naked shoulders of a buxom young lady. Tourists glance at it casually, on their way down to the railway station of Cais de Sodré or up to the mediocre fado places of Bairro Alto. Picking up one of his books, however, will easily convince the reader that Eça de Queiroz is one of the masters of 19th Century fiction, ranking with the more familiar names of English, Russian or French story-telling. Os Maias — A Portuguese Family is one of the greatest European novels of the 19th Century.

Calling him the greatest Portuguese novelist of his time is too narrow a definition. As a journalist and an essayist, he also outshines many contemporaries in the clearness of his vision and the witty elegance of his expression.

The man's ideas, friendships, life and works are a network of contradictions mastered by acute intelligence. He was a dandy, he was a family man; he was a loyal monarchist, he was a socialist; he was poor, he lived in the most aristocratic circles; he was an undistinguished diplomat, he had personal access to the King. He was a craftsman of words, a man who stood hours before a high pulpit in a garret of his house, endlessly scribbling and scratching away, polishing sentences and paragraphs and chapters that he never saw fit to be published. His best-known book, O Crime do Padre Amaro (Father Amaro's sin) came out in three successive versions — the author's dissatisfaction forever fueling academic discussion.

Original, innovative, militant, his work is extremely characteristic of the Portuguese mind, and at the same time totally cosmopolitan. He spent twelve years in England and twelve years in France, and the French hardly know him any better than the English do. He was one of those unconspicuous neighbours, whose presence we merely acknowledge with a nod. We learn when they die that they were admirable — and we blame them for not having required our admiration.

The main and most obvious debt of Portuguese literature to Eça de Queiroz is naturalism, or scientific realism in fiction, both inspired by French authors like Flaubert and in reaction against a romanesque routine and romantic inspiration inherited from Sir Walter Scott. Eça observed life and analysed it with the precision and earnestness of an entomologist. Then, with the talent of a poet and the determination of a moralist, he reconstructed it with elegance and irony.

At the same time, he has left a considerable heritage of essays and chronicles, originally published in Portuguese or Brazilian reviews or magazines, that illuminate the world in his time, in the perspective of a widely travelled, well-read and unprejudiced observer. This part of his work is usually and unjustly overshadowed by the creatures of his fantasy imagination. This may be because the Portuguese themselves, who always tend to minimize their own universality, prefer to concentrate their admiration on the exquisite embroidery of characters and atmosphere that encodes a world too complex for the foreigner to understand.

Perhaps taking Eça de Queiroz as a whole — his life, works and personality together — is a better method with which to direct the general reader's attention.