In 1928, she published her first book, the biography of her father, Joaquim Nabuco, awarded with the Essay Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

[1] Nabuco was accused of plagiarizing the novel Encarnação by Brazilian author José de Alencar, when she wrote A Sucessora, however both books have a similar plot to Jane Eyre.

[5] According to Nabuco herself in the pages of her memoir Oito décadas (Eight Decades), she translated A Sucessora into English hoping to see it published in the United States, and sent it to a New York literary agency, with the request that she also make contact with agents in England.

When the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca was released in Brazil, United Artists' lawyers approached her to sign a term (with financial compensation) agreeing that there had been "coincidence", but Nabuco refused.

[8] University of Pennsylvania's Nina Auerbach, relates, in her work Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress, that Nabuco had written A Sucessora in 1934, sending the translation to an editor in England, who was the same as the English novelist.