Clarice Lispector’s fifth novel, A paixão segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.) came out in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. It was the first book-length narrative she published following her definitive return to Brazil after sixteen years of accompanying her husband on diplomatic postings around the world. During her time abroad, she had continued to write and publish in Brazil, contributing short stories and articles to magazines and newspapers. This served to increase her popularity back home and bring her work to a wider circle of readers than her books alone had managed. In fact, a collection of short stories entitled A Legião Estrangeira (The Foreign Legion) was published the same year as A paixão segundo G.H. and threatened to overshadow the reception of the novel. But this was a short-lived phenomenon: The Passion According to G.H. has since proved to be one of Lispector’s best-loved, bestselling, and best-studied works. This disturbing tale of a woman who kills a cockroach differed from her previous books in the dense, intense voice of its first-person narrator and its episodic and fragmented nature. From the outset, it was well received by the critics, especially in Brazil, with several book-length studies and doctoral theses devoted to it.

The Passion is also one of the most translated of Lispector’s works: into Spanish (Uruguay, 1970), French (1978), Italian (1982), Japanese and German (1984), Spanish (1979), English (1988), Danish and Norwegian (1989). It is seen by many as her magnum opus; the fact that it was chosen to be part of the UNESCO-sponsored Archivos series of critical editions of key Spanish American and lusophone works (published in 1988 with a second edition in 1996) attests to this.