This article seeks to confront some subplots of the established narrative about Portuguese modernism in national literary history with the modernist movement’s wider cultural context, specifically with respect to sex/gender, a factor whose relevance has been traditionally neglected in canonical representations of the period. I focus in particular on the robust emergence of female literary authorship in the first decades of the twentieth century, insofar as this phenomenon may be related with such central events of the modernist canon as the launching of the magazines Orpheu (1915) and presença (1927) and the polemic around the so-called “Literatura de Sodoma” (1922-23).
