Délia’s life and fiction

Fiction and reality are conflated in Délia’s bibliography of short stories, chronicles – the vast majority of which remain scattered – and eight novels: Madalena (1881), Aurélia (1883), Uma vítima (1884), Duas irmãs (1884), Angelina (1886), Lésbia (1890), Celeste (1893), and Mylady (1895). As Norma Telles writes:

Délia contributed to various periodicals from the south to the north of Brazil, covering Rio Grande, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Vitória, and Recife, as well as to O País, Gazeta da Tarde (Rio de Janeiro, 1880–1901), and the women’s periodicals A Família (Rio de Janeiro, 1888–94) and Corymbo (Rio Grande do Sul, 1883–1944).4 On the research to locate Délia’s works in periodicals, see Telles, Délia; Volpini, ‘O literário feminino nos romances oitocentistas de Délia: tradição e ruptura’; Barbieri, ‘Contos na imprensa: Délia e a narrativa breve’, Correia e Silva, ‘Introdução’; Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Alexandro Henrique Paixão, ‘Contos e Délia: Confissões sobre a sedução’, in Maria Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Contos por Délia (1887–1892), pp. 7–24; Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Javer Wilson Volpini, and Ana Cecilia Agua de Melo, ‘Angelina, um folhetim de Délia’, in Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Angelina (Campinas, 2024), pp. 5–28. It was, however, in the Rio de Janeiro newspapers that she made her name as a novelist and short story writer, as she maintained a column in O País between 2 November 1887 and 31 July 1892, totalling twenty-five short stories, as well as publishing the novel Angelina in the ‘Folhetim’ section. Gazeta da Tarde published two of her eight novels, Aurélia and Uma vítima. Meanwhile A Notícia published the second edition of Celeste and her last novel, Mylady.

We know that from the eighteenth century onwards, it was common for women writers to use pseudonyms under which they could express their political positions and ideas. Most of them used male pseudonyms, hoping for greater acceptance. However, in Délia’s case, it is believed that this attitude goes beyond merely concealing her identity. Adopting the pseudonym was a form of (re)baptism for the writer, a reaffirmation of her female identity and a conscious break away from the role of women in patriarchal society, indicating a desire to build a literary body of work that would give voice to these women.

Like most women of the Brazilian elite, the writer had the financial means and a favourable family environment to develop various artistic skills, such as painting, piano, singing, and a taste for literature and foreign languages. According to Ubiratan Machado:

Reading Ubiratan Machado’s A vida literária no Brasil durante o Romantismo, one can ascertain that, from a certain point onwards, women had the opportunity to be educated in the various women’s colleges that existed in the capital of the empire in the late nineteenth century. These institutions provided training for girls belonging to the elite, who would later frequent salons and charity events, and become pianists and tutors of French, dance, and literature. An example of this, for Ubiratan, was the creation of a press aimed exclusively at women, such as O Jornal das Senhoras (Rio de Janeiro, 1852–55), the pages of which were intended to contribute to women’s instruction in the nineteenth century.6 Paixão, ‘Elementos constitutivos para o estudo do público literário’, p. 285. See also Constância Lima Duarte, Imprensa feminina e feminista no Brasil. Século XIX. Dicionário ilustrado (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017). Délia even recreated these prerogatives about women’s education in one of her short stories, entitled ‘Triste reverso’, published in O País on 14 May 1892.

In ‘Triste reverso’, the narrator tells us the story of Alice, a nineteen-year-old girl who is very much in love with her fiancé, the wealthy Gonçalves, who was not her first love. Alice had already given herself to other boys, trying to satisfy her feline nature, says the narrator. In describing her character, the narrator emphasises her beauty, her noble demeanour, the financial limitations faced by her father, and the strategy adopted to provide his daughter with an education that would make her attractive to potential suitors:

Within Brazil’s patriarchal society, the cultural standard required young unmarried women, the so-called ‘marriageable girls’, to be modest, virginal, submissive to men and to their future husbands, all examples of feminine dignity and purity, which were then converted into a happy marriage and a sufficiently good motherhood, something we will not find in Délia’s character. Because Alice had a free personality, capable of loving many men, while, when it came to motherhood, she was rather inadequate, as she did not meet the patriarchal society’s expectations of a woman–mother: submission to the home and her children. She cultivated free love and behaved in a transgressive manner, a behaviour that is repeated in other characters in Délia’s short stories, as we shall examine.

That is all we need to know about Alice, because what interests us now is to highlight that the theme of female education is important to Délia, because she herself, as a woman, depended on the educational conditions for women in nineteenth-century Brazil for her self-learning. We know that there were some private schools for girls in Rio de Janeiro; however, even at the end of the century, educational progress had yet to be achieved effectively, and each individual woman had to fight for her own education.

Délia ended up following these recommendations to the letter, transforming her learning process into literary expression in the form of short stories, novels, and chronicles. The space that Délia gained in Brazilian periodicals, alongside important Portuguese and Brazilian intellectuals, is proof of the recognition that the writer earned from the Republic of Letters during her lifetime. She contributed to O País alongside names such as Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, Manoel Pinheiro Chagas, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, and Joaquim Nabuco.

Unfortunately, after her death, like so many other important writers of her time, her name was silenced and forgotten by the literary canon. As the writer D. Jayme wrote in the magazine Fon Fon Rio de Janeiro, 1907–58) in 1937:

It was only in the 1980s, thanks to the movement to recover literary works by nineteenth-century female authors, that writers like Délia began to feature in literary studies. Of particular note is the pioneering work of researcher Zahidé Lupinacci Muzart, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, who led the working group A Mulher na Literatura (Women in Literature), set up in 1985 at ANPOLL (National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistics). With the collaboration of researchers from all over Brazil, Muzart managed to compile, organise, and publish three large volumes dedicated to nineteenth-century women writers. The anthology Escritoras brasileiras do século XIX, volume I (1999), volume II (2004), and volume III (2009), retrieved more than 150 writers from Brazilian literary anonymity.9 Zahidé Lupinacci Muzart, Escritoras brasileiras do século XIX, vol. I (Florianópolis: Editora Mulheres, 1999), vol. II (Florianópolis: Editora Mulheres, 2004), vol. III (Florianópolis: Editora Mulheres, 2009). Muzart also founded Editora Mulheres, which (re)published many works by these writers, including three novels by Délia, Lésbia, Duas Irmãs, and Aurélia, all edited by Norma Telles.10 Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Lésbia, Norma Telles (ed.) (Florianópolis, [1884] 1998); Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Duas irmãs, Norma Telles (ed.) ([1883] 2011), <www.normatelles.com.br/_files/ugd/b7613b_087153ba1d35494f9643484298c25d55.pdf>[accessed 20 Jan. 2024]; Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia), Aurélia, Norma Telles (ed.) ([1883] Florianópolis, Editora Mulheres, 2014).