A woman of letters

One of Almeida’s most enduring collaborations was with O País (Rio de Janeiro, 1884–1934), a republican daily founded at a ‘time of intense political unrest’, which encompassed the anti-slavery and republican movements.1 Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Tania Regina de Luca, ‘Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho: de Portugal para o Brasil’, in Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho, Conversas lisbonenses & outros escritos (1884–1889), Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva and Tania Regina de Luca (eds) (Campinas: FE-Unicamp, 2022), pp. 9–34. Between 1884 and 1912, she had almost 500 fictional and non-fictional texts published in this newspaper: chronicles, letters, short stories, children’s literature, and an epistolary novel. Her contributions were irregular at first, interspersed with long breaks, but later became a regular, weekly feature in the paper. Her texts were almost always printed on the front page; most were signed with her own name, and just over 100 were written under a pseudonym. The texts were often also reproduced by other periodicals, an indication of how well they were received.

In this chapter, we will analyse some of the confrontations and conflicts experienced by the writer in her efforts to remain an active intellectual in a markedly male environment.

One can note in her career how publishing in book form resulted from periodical publication, a practice that allowed her (and other writers of her time) to test the reception of her writing among the readers and earn twice the money from the same work. Almost all of the author’s novels were published in serial format in the Brazilian newspapers, especially in the capital. The short stories and chronicles followed a similar trajectory, from newspaper to book, with the difference that not all the short texts published in newspapers were actually collated in a book. As a result, some of the author’s work remains unknown today.

During her lifetime, Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s literary production was released in book form by some of the most renowned and active publishing houses of the early twentieth century, including Garnier, Francisco Alves, and Companhia Editora Nacional. Furthermore, some of the first editions were launched in Portugal and Germany. Her contemporary critics praised her: José Veríssimo, for example, one of the most important Brazilian critics of the nineteenth century, highlighted the ‘impression of fidelity’ left by the fictional representation of Rio de Janeiro life in the novel A Falência (1901).2 José Veríssimo, Estudos de literatura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1905), p. 144.

When presented in this retrospective and detached manner, Almeida’s career seems to have been a smooth, trouble-free path, which is a misleading impression. The dominance of men at the turn of the twentieth century was as comprehensive in the Brazilian literary scene as it was in public life, making it very difficult for women to be accepted as intellectuals. In the aforementioned article by José Veríssimo, for example, every praise is followed by a drawback, suggesting an opinion that the writer’s work lacked something in terms of quality:

By systematically pointing to simplicity and straightforwardness as the central characteristics of the author’s style, Veríssimo and others downplayed the strong, violent, and audacious elements also contained in her work. Intensity and violence are found in both the themes and the style, even more evident in the former, especially in the short stories, such as ‘Os porcos’, ‘O caso de Ruth’, and ‘Sob as estrelas’, all of them from Ânsia eterna (1903). In these and other short stories, ‘the author touches on intimate and social wounds, providing a literary representation of shouted violence and silent oppression with very realistic traits’.4 Milena Ribeiro Martins, ‘Lar violento lar: contos nada singelos de Júlia Lopes de Almeida’, in Mulheres na História, Inovações de gênero entre o público e o privado, Cláudia de Oliveira (ed.) (Petrópolis: Literar, 2020), p. 188.

Leonora de Luca formulated the plausible hypothesis that Almeida’s strategically adopted a style to enable her to remain active on the predominantly male cultural scene:

In the absence of personal letters, testimonies, and memoirs, how can we document the writer’s possible awareness of the pressure she was under to limit herself to certain themes, to limit the tone and volume of her voice? Are journalistic texts capable of providing evidence of such pressures, whether explicit or latent? Considering that journalistic texts bear the marks of the immediacy associated with the frequency of publication (‘car le rythme condittione les poétiques’ (‘because rhythm conditions poetics’), as Marie-Ève Thérenty says6 Marie-Ève Thérenty, La littérature au quotidien, Poétiques journalistiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2007), p. 55.), as well as the marks of sharing experiences with other journalists and writers; and also considering that the hybrid nature of the chronicle makes space for confessional and memoir-type openings, we will analyse in these texts traces of the difficulties, confrontations, and conflicts faced by the writer at different times during her work as a contributor to O País.