Maria Firmina dos Reis was born on São Luís Island, Maranhão, on March 11, 1822, but was baptized on December 21, 1825, due to an illness that she fought during her first few years of life.
On June 25, 1847, After enrolling in the public contest for the primary education course in the village of Guimarães, which was only possible for those 25 years old or older, Maria Firmina requested a new baptismal justification certificate, in which she informed that her date of birth was March 11, 1822, and that her mother was Leonor Felipa.
João Pedro Esteves, a wealthy man, was a partner of the former owner of Maria Firmina's mother, the slave Leonor Felipa, in his trading company.
[5] This innovative action lasted until the first meeting of the lutas das feministas brasileiras ('the fights of the Brazilian feminists') near the end of the 19th century, which advocated for equality in the education available to young women in Brasil.
[6] Maria Firma dos Reis was very active in the intellectual community of Maranhão: she worked with local press, published books, participated in various anthologies, was a musician and songwriter, and abolitionist.
She was held in high esteem by her students and by those that lived in the village: every parade in Guimaraes made a stop at her door to cheer, to which she would give an impromptu speech.
As a "privileged free black woman within nineteenth-century colonial slave society", Maria Firmina dos Reis "stands out because she was very well-educated and a vigorous opponent of slavery".
[...] Luiza Lobo has since opposed the allegation by presenting Ana Eurídice Eufrosina de Barandas of Porto Alegre as the first female Brazilian novelist.
"[14] But the "long-term symbolic value of Maria Firmina dos Reis's only novel Úrsula (1859) rests in its distinction as a work that lays the foundations for an Afro-Brazilian female literary consciousness.
[16] In her PhD thesis Life Among the Living Dead, Carolyn Kendrick-Alcantara (2007) analyzes "the Gothic as a powerful abolitionist discourse in Brazil and Cuba through [her] readings of Maria Firmina dos Reis′ Ursula and Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y Arteaga′s Sab".
The first element that composes writing, the body, refers to the subjective dimension of black existence, being an archive of impressions throughout life, marked on the skin and in the constant struggle for the affirmation and reversal of stereotypes.
[22] Maria Firmina presents black people in her novels, giving them human dimensions and gives a position as a subject of discourse, which can reveal an intimate identification with the enslaved black person, presenting a solidarity that, in the words of Eduardo de Assis Duarte, "is born from a perspective another, through which the writer, sister to the captives and their descendants, expresses, through fiction, her belonging to this universe of culture".