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

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.