Lady Bobs, Her Brother And I

Lady Bobs, Her Brother And I

Jean Chamblin

Jean DuPuy Chamblin (Nevada, 1876 – aft. 1950), with family roots in Virginia and France, dedicated her life to theater, writing, and activism. She achieved episodic success as an actress, playing alongside actors and actresses such as Tyrone Power Sr. and Mrs. Fiske (in 1899, at The Fifth Avenue Theatre, in Becky Sharp, with the role of Marquise de Steyne). In 1919 she traveled to France to work for the American Expeditionary Force as Secretary of the National War Work Council of the YMCA. She traveled multiple times throughout her life, both in the US, as an actress, and abroad, especially in Europe. In 1902 she visited the Azores, as did her character Kate, perhaps escaping the realization of her obscurity as an actress. She left New York on the steamer Dona Maria, passed through Faial, São Jorge, and Angra do Heroísmo, and arrived in Ponta Delgada around May 8, 1902. She stayed there until the end of July, at the Hotel Brown, where she met the owners. She made the obligatory excursions to Sete Cidades and Furnas, immersed herself in the life of Rua do Beco, participated in and photographed the Festas do Espírito Santo, and took notes for her fictionalized, almost autobiographical and epistolary travel narrative. She published it in 1905, at Putnam, after it had been serialized in The Critic. Aside from the screenplay for the silent film Back to the Simple Life, from 1914, no other works by her are known.

MANUEL MENEZES DE SEQUEIRA (translation)

Was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1965, and grew up some 25 km west, in Cascais. He attended Instituto Superior Técnico, then part of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, where he got his B.Eng., M.Eng, and Ph.D., all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His academic career led him to teach at ISCTE-IUL, the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the Instituto Piaget, and the Universidade Europeia, in or around Lisbon. After a first trip to the Azores in 1991, he returned in 1997, having then visited Flores island for the first time. He came back to Flores annually, on vacation, between 1999 and 2017. In 2018 he made his home in Flores, an island where, surrounded by the “flowers of diligence and strengthwith roots of wit” that Pedro da Silveira so well described, he spends his time renovating a couple of traditional houses in the parish of Mosteiro, and tries, with his wife, to give new life to the beautiful hamlet of Caldeira do Mosteiro. In his spare time he hikes through the old paths of Flores and delves into archives looking for historical references to his adopted land.

ISBN: 9789897355257