Objectives and methodological procedures of the project

The re-establishment of dialogue and interconnection between titles and individuals fosters networks of sociability around journalism, encompassing friendship bonds, relationships of solidarity, as well as disputes and animosities, as demonstrated by the analysis of the editorials. While these issues may not be entirely original, they have gained depth from the newly available data, particularly concerning potential diachronic and synchronic comparisons. This approach enables fresh interpretations of the dynamic world of printed periodicals, which has never been fully understood in isolation.

The complete collection of O País is available in the Brazilian Digital Library of the National Library (HDBN), which has been online since 2012 with millions of pages and more than 5,000 titles available. Despite offering the opportunity to peruse all the issues of the same periodical or, in broader terms, all the copies on the portal, due to the constraints of the programme that converts texts into images, the results were rather incomplete due to the state of preservation of the surviving originals, the quality of the digitisation process itself, and the challenge of locating other contributors in addition to the four mentioned, who featured regularly in the paper. It was therefore necessary to consult each and every one of the newspaper’s pages between 1884 and 1912 with the aim of systematically locating all contributions by women, even though, as explained above, the work of transcribing, editing, and publishing the material in open access books, with critical studies and indexes, was carried out for the four selected authors. In the page-by-page search for the names of the best-known female authors, more than a thousand short prose contributions published between 1884 and 1912 by a total of thirty-eight writers were identified, including the four authors prioritised in the project. The results achieved, rather than underlining absence, point to a constant presence, as can be seen in Table 0.1.

The total number of contributions refers to each newspaper issue containing a published work, whether a short story, novel, or chronicle, serialised or printed in full. For example, Délia’s novel Angelina appeared across 69 issues as a serial, while her 25 short stories were published in 31 issues of O País, totaling 100 contributions.The discovery of so many texts by female contributors with a more or less continuous presence, some of whom achieved critical and commercial success and space in the traditionally male-dominated Republic of Letters, is proof that researching primary sources in newspapers and magazines is still the main vehicle for decentralising the literary canon in terms of female authorship and, therefore, for rewriting the history of Brazilian literature.

While contributing to the re-evaluation of women writers’ presence in the mainstream press of the Belle Époque, the critical reading of chronicles and short stories directly in newspapers demonstrates the tension between what Roger Chartier defines as, on the one hand, the identity of a work, which is recognisable and perpetuated regardless of its materiality, and, on the other, the mobility of the texts, the mobility of their readings, material forms, and modes of attribution.1 Roger Chartier, ‘Literature and Written Culture: Stability of Works, Mobility of Texts, Plurality of Readings’, in The Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century: Theatre, the Book and Reading in the Transatlantic World, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Márcia Abreu (eds) (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 11–26. The quality of the original typesetting and printing, the marks of the passage of time, which have resulted in mutilated or illegible pages, the quality of the digitisation, and, finally, rendering texts through a digital representation creates several challenges for recognising the identity of the work. The page of O País that featured Délia’s short story ‘Os primos’, reproduced in Figure 0.1, illustrates the various challenges in transcribing and editing the texts. Due to the wear and tear of the support, the newspaper page was patched up with adhesive tape. This shows up as rectangular stains in the digitalised images, rendering several passages of the story illegible.

One can compare the fragility of this short story’s conveyance – and that of several of our authors’ contributions – to the surviving fragments of Sappho’s work, which are perhaps the paradigmatic example in Western literature of the vulnerability of the literary heritage of antiquity. As in the case of Sappho, the loss or destruction of works by Brazilian women writers of the Belle Époque can be ascribed to various factors, including the physical deterioration of manuscripts or prints, the passage of time, political and social changes, and the systemic silencing in life and post-mortem of female authorship. Despite all these vicissitudes, the surviving fragments of Sappho’s work continue to captivate the imagination of successive generations of readers and scholars around the world, as they evoke emotions, explore themes of love, desire, and longing as well as offering a unique perspective on the experiences of women in ancient Greece. As revealed in Chapter 2 of this book, Delia’s short stories are composed of the same material. They recount the (mis)adventures of love experienced by fictional women in the late nineteenth century, who were profoundly impacted by sexual tension stemming from their relationships with husbands, lovers, or family members. Even if the recovery of works by the women contributors to O País is a job that presents fewer challenges than that for Sappho, the comparison, on the one hand, serves as a reminder of the importance of diligent efforts to preserve and transmit the works of Brazilian women writers from the past and of the limitations inherent to our understanding of Brazilian literature due to the countless gaps in its history and, on the other, points to the unlimited potential for redefining and reinterpreting the literary canon.

The flip side of the identity of the texts, that is, their mobility, their diverse readings and material forms, requires a better understanding of the relationship between the texts and their means of publication, as Chartier writes. In nineteenth-century Brazil, as in Europe, it was common for writers to publish their short stories in periodicals before publishing them in book form. And for a long time, the dissemination of the chronicle was time-limited due to its medium, in most cases only being collected in volumes many years after the writer’s death. The periodical, however, replaced the book as the predominant means of disseminating prose fiction, principally due to print runs being larger than those of first book editions. Whereas the first editions of novels and short stories were printed in roughly 500 or 1,000 copies, the print run of mass-circulation newspapers was up to thirty times greater. Furthermore, many texts were reproduced in various periodicals, especially those by Délia (Chapter 2) and Júlia Lopes de Almeida (Chapters 3 and 4). However, much of women’s collaboration in the newspaper O País had not been collated in book form until very recently. For example, the first collection of Délia’s texts was only published in 2022, as we shall see in Chapter 2. Among these privileged women writers, as far as we know, only Júlia Lopes de Almeida and Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, who are examined in Chapters 1, 3, and 4, reused some of their texts for the production of books.

Moreover, reading a short story or chronicle in a volume compared to in a newspaper or magazine offers readers differing experiences: engaging with the text in its entirety or enjoying it serialised across consecutive instalments. The longer texts were split into instalments, such as the short story ‘Uma história de ontem’, by Délia, published on 2, 3, 6, and 7 November 1887, and the chronicle ‘Conversações Lisbonenses – George Sand, vista à luz da sua correspondência’, by Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, published on 12 and 13 July 1885. In fact, a common feature of the mainstream press in the late nineteenth century was the coexistence of these two models for disseminating fiction. Large circulation newspapers and magazines, such as O País, Gazeta de Notícias, Jornal das Famílias, and A Estação, published fiction in both these formats, offering complementary rhythms of reading enjoyment.2 See Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, ‘Os contos de Machado de Assis: periodicidade e ficção no Brasil no século XIX’. Revista Livro, 7/8 (2019), pp. 25–67. For example, page 2 of the 3 November 1887 edition of O País, reproduced in Figure 0.2, features the continuation of ‘Uma história de ontem’ (in columns 7 and 8), a chronicle by Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho from the series ‘Conversas femininas’ (in column 8). At the bas-de-page are two episodes of serialised French novels: instalment 19 of O remorso de um anjo, by A. D’Ennery, and instalment 53 of O charlatão, by Ellie Berthet.

On the one hand, the materiality of the novel and short story in serialised formats, conditioned by the dissemination in instalments and newspaper sales by subscription, prolonged the reading pleasure and was a determining factor in creating meaning and establishing a close bond between author and reader.3 Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Leitores de Tinta e Papel: elementos constitutivos para o estudo do público literário (Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 2017); N.N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1986). The extended reading time was a crucial element of the literature published in serial format, as readers and critics developed assumptions and provisional interpretations about the literary world, which then shaped their progressive understanding of the works as they developed part by part.4 Linda Hughes and Michael Lund, ‘Linear Stories and Circular Vision: The Decline of the Victorian Serial’, in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, N. Katherine Hayles (ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 167–194. The reactions to and involvement with such extended works differed to those that readers experienced when reading a text or group of texts collected in a book. On the other hand, the publication of short stories in a single issue satisfied the desire to read a fictional text from start to finish without the reader having to commit to a subscription or buy consecutive issues of the periodical.

The inclusion of short stories and chronicles by women was therefore guided by the commercial logic of boosting the number of subscriptions and the purchase of single copies by the growing female readership of daily periodicals. This was at a time when newspapers were moving towards becoming companies, which in turn gave increasingly more importance to advertisements and subscriptions, even though they depended heavily on the political field.5 See Silva, ‘Os contos de Machado de Assis’. Reading women’s contributions in the pages of O País therefore invites us to question the distinction between literature, journalism, and advertising because their material form and reading mobility were based on a very different framework to that of the book. Each edition of the newspaper can be seen as a single text with multiple authors. Readers were presented with short stories, chronicles, other textual forms and advertisements, all interconnected by the same editorial principle.