Maria Firmina dos Reis – Between Writing and Erasure

Maria Firmina dos Reis, the first Brazilian female novelist

Úrsula and the Right to Narrate One’s Own Pain

Maria Firmina dos Reis was born in 1822, in the state of Maranhão, in northeastern Brazil, and died in 1917. Between those two dates, she authored a novel, poems, short stories, and hymns; founded a free, coeducational school; and defended, through both writing and practice, the dignity of people whom Brazilian society preferred to keep voiceless.

The most revealing fact, however, lies not in the chronology, but in the long silence that followed her work. For decades, Maria Firmina dos Reis existed more as an absence than as a presence in Brazilian literary history.

Úrsula, published in 1859, is often presented as the first Brazilian novel written by a woman and as one of the country’s earliest abolitionist narratives. Both statements are correct, but insufficient.

What makes Úrsula a decisive book is not only the fact that it was written by a Black woman in the nineteenth century, but the way the author shifts the narrative gaze.

For the first time, enslaved characters do not appear merely as a moral backdrop, but as subjects capable of narrating their own pain, their own memory, and their own humanity. This gesture, in nineteenth-century Brazil, was far from trivial; it was an act of rupture.

Brazilian literature of the period was still organized around European models, concerned with forging a national identity that rarely included the bodies and voices of the enslaved population. Maria Firmina writes within these conventions, but strains them.

The novel retains the sentimental structure typical of its time, yet inserts into it an element that unsettles the reader: the suffering of enslaved people is not a rhetorical device to exalt white virtue, but an experience narrated from within. This choice alters the moral axis of the work.

It is not difficult to understand why this book found no comfortable place in the literary canon. Maria Firmina did not fit into any of the categories later literary criticism would use to organize national literature.

She was a woman, Black, from Maranhão, a teacher, and outside the intellectual circles of Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, her writing did not fully serve the ideological projects of her own time, nor those of the period that followed. The result was an almost complete historical erasure, corrected only at the end of the twentieth century, when her name began to reappear in academic studies and belated reprints.

But reducing Maria Firmina dos Reis to the status of a precursor is also a subtle form of emptying her work of its force. She did not write merely before others; she wrote against. Against the naturalization of slavery, against the educational exclusion of women, against the idea that certain subjects were unworthy of the written word.

Her work as an educator reinforces this practical dimension of her writing. By founding a coeducational school at a time when gender segregation was the rule, Maria Firmina transformed intellectual conviction into concrete action.

There is, in her work, an ethics of attention that deserves emphasis. The enslaved characters of Úrsula are neither idealized nor used as abstract symbols. They speak of loss, violence, and longing for their homeland.

This attention to human detail anticipates debates that would only much later become central to literary criticism and historical studies. Maria Firmina was not writing to theorize slavery, but to make it unbearable to the attentive gaze.

The prolonged forgetting of her work says more about Brazilian cultural history than about her literary merits. For a long time, the country preferred to construct a literary tradition based on male, white, urban figures, treating exceptions as curiosities. Maria Firmina was not an exception; she was an ignored foundation.

Her recent rediscovery should not be seen as an act of symbolic reparation, but as a historical correction. To read Maria Firmina dos Reis today is to confront the persistence of certain historical silences not only those of the nineteenth century, but those that extended throughout the twentieth century and, in many respects, remain.

Her writing does not ask for indulgence or belated admiration. It asks for attentive reading. By restoring her to the center of Brazilian literary history, we do not merely expand the repertoire of Black women writers under study; we alter the very way we understand the formation of literature in Brazil.

Maria Firmina wrote at a time when writing was not granted to her as a right. The fact that her work has crossed time, despite everything, is neither miracle nor chance. It is the consequence of an insurgent writing that, from the outset, refused the place of silence assigned to her.

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