Off in the distance, where you can barely see or hear them, are the bumbling men who shape and limit the lives of the women they call wife, family, or lover. Patriarchy, it turns out, offers very little wiggle room to the subjected, no matter how rebellious or well brought up, how young, old, rich, or poor. In Empty Wardrobes, Maria Judite de Carvalho's 1978 novel, translated here from Portuguese into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa, the widow Dora enters her tenth year of grieving. Her husband, "a Christ" so principled he rejects any ambition whatsoever as a construct of a corrupt society, left her and their daughter with nothing. When her mother-in-law reveals a world-shattering secret about the marriage late one night, Dora's narrative of her own life is destroyed, emptied of meaning as thoroughly as it was of material resources at the moment of her husband's sudden death. Dora and her daughter have little recourse but to start again, each in their own way—but is there any hope for a better outcome?

Narrated through the gritted teeth of an acquaintance, Carvalho's short tale of fading grief, new life, and quiet devastation lays bare the limitations of patriarchal love and the ambient savageries perched and waiting in its every crevice.