Her distinctive and innovative works delve into diverse narrative forms, weaving themes of intimacy and introspection, earning her subsequent international acclaim.

While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

Lispector left Brazil in 1944 following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States.

Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977.

Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories (2015), describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Franz Kafka.

Her family suffered significantly in the pogroms that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire, circumstances later dramatized in her older sister Elisa Lispector's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948).

After three years, during which Marieta's health deteriorated rapidly, they moved to the city of Recife, Pernambuco, settling in the neighbourhood of Boa Vista, where they lived at number 367 in the Praça Maciel Pinheiro and later in the Rua da Imperatriz.

[2] In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother – who was paralysed (although some speculate she had been raped in the Ukraine pogroms,[2] there is no confirmation on this by relatives and close friends)[3] there are records that Mania's illness was in fact hemiplegia, that is, partial paralysis of half of the body resulting from trauma (violence inflicted by Bolsheviks during a pogrom) and that later she also had tremors caused by Parkinson's disease)[4] – finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42, when Clarice was nine.

While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite.

Cardoso was gay, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty.

[8] "Clarice Lispector's work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel," wrote the São Paulo critic Sérgio Milliet.

When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she only read these authors after the book was ready.

Shortly afterwards, Lispector and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belém, in the state of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon.

There, Maury served as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the international visitors who were using northern Brazil as a military base in World War II.

On July 29, 1944, Lispector left Brazil for the first time since she had arrived as a child, destined for Naples, where Gurgel was posted to the Brazilian Consulate.

She worked at the city's military hospital, taking care of wounded Brazilian troops[12] In Rome, Lispector met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico.

Gilda de Melo e Sousa wrote, "Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits" [.

What saved me from the monotony of Bern was living in the Middle Ages, it was waiting for the snow to pass and for the red geraniums to be reflected once again in the water, it was having a son born there, it was writing one of my least liked books, The Besieged City, which, however, people come to like when they read it a second time; my gratitude to that book is enormous: the effort of writing it kept me busy, saved me from the appalling silence of Bern, and when I finished the last chapter I went to the hospital to give birth to the boy.

"[18] After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Lispector and Gurgel traveled to Torquay, Devon, where he was a delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

"I hated it, but I did what I had to […] I gave dinner parties, I did everything you're supposed to do, but with a disgust…"[20] She increasingly missed her sisters and Brazil, and in June 1959, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In Brazil, Lispector struggled financially and tried to find a publisher for the novel she had completed in Washington several years before, as well as for her book of stories, Laços de família (Family Ties).

[23] In 1964, Lispector published one of her most shocking and famous books, A paixão segundo G.H., about a woman who, in the maid's room of her comfortable Rio penthouse, endures a mystical experience that leads to her eating part of a cockroach.

In August 1967, she began writing a weekly column ("crônica") for the Jornal do Brasil, an important Rio newspaper, which greatly expanded her fame beyond the intellectual and artistic circles that had long admired her.

In 1971, Lispector published another book of stories, Felicidade clandestina (Covert Joy), several of which hearkened back to memories of her childhood in Recife.

Olga Borelli, a former nun who entered her life around this time and became her faithful assistant and friend, recalled: She was insecure and asked a few people for their opinion.

"With this fiction," one critic wrote, "Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection.

Though her previous books had often taken her years to complete, the latter was written in three days, after a challenge from her publisher, Álvaro Pacheco, to write stories about themes relating to sex.

[30]Lispector worked on a book called Um sopro de vida: pulsações (A Breath of Life: Pulsations) that would be published posthumously in the mid-1970s.

She used this fragmentary form for her final and perhaps most famous novel, A Hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star, 1977), piecing the story together, with the help of Olga Borelli, from notes scrawled on loose bits of paper.

The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, one of the iconic characters in Brazilian literature, a starving, poor typist from Alagoas, the state where Lispector's family first arrived, lost in the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro.