Maria Firmina dos Reis was a Brazilian abolitionist, author and novelist. She is best known for being Brazil’s first novelist, and one of its earliest feminist thinkers. Firmina dos Reis was born on the island of Sao Luis in Maranhao in 1852 to a freed Brazilian woman and a black slave. She was not raised on the island however; her mother took her back to the mainland where the two lived with Firmina dos Reis’s grandmother. Firmina dos Reis received much of her education at home with her family, and when she was 22 she began teaching primary school to Brazilian children. This became her primary profession, and her access to education placed Firmina dos Reis in a privileged position that many in colonial Brazil did not possess. However, she never forgot where her family came from and always understood what role society wanted her to play. In 1859 Firmina dos Reis published her landmark work Ursula. It is a novel of a young girl who falls in love with two men, one good the other bad. While the character is expected to pursue the good man she instead falls for the villain. She suffers under his cruelty and society’s throughout the novel. Ursula represents how women are treated when they deviate from established societal norms. She uses her characters to represent elements of her life, her mother’s, and enslaved peoples. However, the largest impact it had was how it depicted the enslaved characters. She portrayed them as fully realized individuals with desires and hope, and a dream to one day be free and live life like everyone else. Her depictions were moving and so accurate that many modern scholars have used Ursula as a primary source for discussing slavery in Brazil. Firmina dos Reis continued to write on these subjects throughout her life. She published, poems, essays, and stories in local newspapers and would become one of Brazil’s leading abolitionists. In 1881, when she was 55, she retired from teaching and opened the first mixed school in all of Brazil. Firmina dos Reis understood the importance of education and the uplifting power that comes with it. Firmina dos Reis fell into obscurity until the 1960s when her work was rediscovered. Brazilians, and Afro-Brazilian scholars, began to republish her entire body of work and highlighted her activist and intellectual work. She has since become a significant Brazilian figure and widely known as one of the first novelists the country produced and one of its first abolitionists.

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