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1 results

  • 19 - Maria Firmina dos Reis, Nineteenth-Century Maranhão (Brazil)

  • from Part III - Envisaging Emancipation during Second Slavery
  • Edited by Erica L. Ball, Occidental College, Los Angeles, Tatiana Seijas, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton
  • Book:
    As If She Were Free
    Published online:
    24 September 2020
    Print publication:
    08 October 2020, pp 344-356

  • Summary

    Maria Firmina dos Reis was born in São Luiz do Maranhão, a remote northern province of the Brazilian Empire, probably in 1825. The daughter of a black father and a white mother, and a self-taught woman who had never received formal education, Maria Firmina became the youngest elementary teacher in a newly founded local school. In 1859, she published the novel Ursula and became the first black woman to publish a literary text in Brazil. Ursula not only offers harsh criticism of slavery and the slave-owning patriarchal family, but also gives narrative voice to enslaved characters and their reflections on life under captivity. Forgotten for more than a century, her work started to gain recognition in the 1970s. Nowadays revered as a pioneering black novelist, she is, along with Luiz Gama - former slave, also a self-taught man who became a lawyer, poet and anti-slavery militant - the founder of Afro-Brazilian literature.