You will soon reach thirteen years of age! I therefore write for my innocent Livia, who knows nothing of the world but the cares with which her tender mother has directed her in her childhood, and in these circumstances, seeking to shape my language to fit your childish understanding, I will begin by instilling in you here in a simple and clear style a daughter’s duties and virtues. I do not want, nor do I wish to anticipate your ideas in deeper knowledge, on which years and study will make you meditate; may the tenderness and experience of your sad mother then serve you as a guide on the harsh path of life. For now I speak to my little Livia. May she, despite her age, listen to me with the attention of a daughter, for whose happiness I swore upon her Father’s tomb to live.5

After some prefatory material, Floresta’s readers in 1842 came to a text that opens thus. Nisia Floresta published a variety of works, including a translation of Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman; here, she chooses to address her pre-teenage daughter in a public discourse. One may speculate on what led to this publication: is this text opposed to the Wollstonecraft text, or do the two works stand in a continuum? The question remains pertinent. Certainly, there is an element of captatio benevolentiae for a nineteenth-century woman writer in presenting herself to the public as a widow and mother; and yet, what could be more feminist than to assert her daughter’s right to self-determination, to agency, as exemplified in the advice her mother offers her as a sort of spiritual dowry? Her daughter, Floresta suggests, will be the captain of her soul, in William Ernest Henley’s famous words. And Floresta asserts this early. For readers other than her daughter, Floresta thus offers a variety of things: a brief domestic idyll; traditional women’s roles played out, rather interestingly, in public; and antithetically, an empowerment of mother and daughter in dialogue, independent of any patriarchal gaze, in which a matrilineal succession is established and celebrated. The inheritance is immaterial—since the text, both dowry and testament, leaves only words to the daughter—but perhaps all the more powerful for that.

What is Floresta’s daughter to make of this text? She is after all its uniquely privileged reader. Let us begin with the Father’s place in this extract, and the fact that the Father is dead. The fact itself might be happenstance, but its function in the text is not; while the father is definitionally and irrecoverably absent, he determines Floresta’s mother’s discourse, as the conclusion of the opening paragraph makes explicit. The entire text is thus situated under his paternal aegis; his dead hand, in a sense, starts the motor of this plot. And yet, just as the goddess Athena’s aegis sheltered Odysseus without limiting his free will, so both mother and daughter—two women—are autonomous agents here. The father’s only wish, after all, is evidently for his daughter’s happiness. As to the mother’s status, it is somewhat complex. Unlike the father, she is prescriptive: she is like Solon a lawgiver, communicating “a child’s duties and virtues.” She is also, by virtue of circumstance, both mother and father, both public and private, a sort of doubled being. And lastly, she has her own story, one of “the tenderness and experience of your sad mother.” If her daughter is a tabula rasa, Floresta is not; and one reason for her writing, as the word “sad” indicates, is to transmit to the girl what she as a woman has learned the hard way.

Beatriz Francisca de Assis Brandão (29 July 1779–5 February 1868) was born in Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto), then the largest city in Brazil and a center of agitation for Brazilian independence. The Brandãos had close ties to the Brazilian imperial family. In 1816, Brandão married Vicente Batista Rodrigues Alvarenga, divorcing in 1839 and moving to Rio de Janeiro. She was the lover of the poet Tomás António Gonzaga, publishing her poems in the Brazilian press and in collected volumes. In 1852–1857, Marmota Fluminense alone published thirty-eight of her poems. Much of her work is lost, and about 500 pages of poetry remains in manuscript. She also translated several plays by Pietro Metastasio, many now lost, and worked throughout her life as an educator in girls’ schools to support herself.6

Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta [pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto] (12 October 1810–24 April 1885), born in Papari, married Manuel Augusto de Faria Rocha in 1828; he died in 1831. Floresta published her Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens in 1832, freely inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft—perhaps the first feminist text in Latin America. Moving in 1838 to Rio de Janeiro, she founded the radical Augusto College school for girls, directing it until 1849. Her Conselhos a minha filha appeared in 1842. Floresta left in 1849 for Paris, returning to Brazil in 1852. Her progressive newspaper articles were collected before her return to Europe in 1856–1872; she also published poetry, novels, travel memoirs, and essays. A Mulher [The Woman] appeared in 1859. After returning to Brazil in 1872–1875, Floresta then sailed back to Europe, publishing her last work in French in 1878.7

Chile (2 writers)

María del Carmen Thomasa del Rosario Arriagada García (1807–12 January 1888), born in Chillán Viejo, married the German Eduardo Gutike in 1825, moving with him to Linares, then Talca in 1836. Her sixteen-year correspondence with the painter Mauricio Rugendas, whom she met in 1835, is considered the first women’s writing in independent Chile. In it, she militates for better education for women and observes Chilean society.8

Josefa de los Dolores Peña y Lillo Barbosa [or Sister Josefa de los Dolores or Sister Dolores Peña y Lillo] (25 March or 25 May 1739-August 1822/1823), born in Santiago, joined a Dominican convent in 1751 (becoming a nun in 1756) and began writing in 1763, both letters and poetry. She had some political influence in the early republic. Her writings are among the first women’s writings in Chile, alongside the autobiography of the nun Ursula Suarez and the poems of Juana López and the nun Tadea de San Joaquín. Other texts by colonial nuns have likely been lost: spiritual instructions, diaries, autobiographies, letters. Sister Josefa’s over a hundred letters to her Jesuit confessor from 1763–1769 were rediscovered in 1923 and partially published in 2008.9

Colombia (1 writer)

María Josefa Acevedo Sánchez de Gómez [or Josefa Acevedo or Josefa Acevedo de Gómez] (23 January 1803–19 January 1861), born in Bogotá, married Diego Fernándo Gómez in 1822. Her first work, the marriage manual Ensayo sobre los deberes de los casados, appeared anonymously. Acevedo published formal verse, 1854–1856, more essays on marriage in 1848, and biographies of various famous contemporaries in 1850–1860, leaving a manuscript two-act play called La coqueta burlada, a novel, and an autobiography. Other works were lost, and her Cuadros de la vida privada de algunos granadinos appeared posthumously.10

Cuba (1 writer)

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Sab (1841)

Veinte años hace, poco más o menos, que al declinar una tarde del mes de junio un joven de hermosa presencia atravesaba a caballo los campos pintorescos que riega el Tínima, y dirigía a paso corto su brioso alazán por la senda conocida en el país con el nombre de camino de Cubitas, por conducir a las aldeas de este nombre, llamadas también tierras rojas. Hallábase el joven de quien hablamos a distancia de cuatro leguas de Cubitas, de donde al parecer venía, y a tres de la ciudad de Puerto Principe, capital de la provincia central de la isla de Cuba en aquella época, como al presente, pero que hacía entonces muy pocos años había dejado su humilde dictado de villa.

Fuese efecto de poco conocimiento del camino que seguia, fuese por complacencia de contemplar detenidamente los paisajes que se ofrecían a su vista, el viajero acortaba cada vez más el paso de su caballo y le paraba a trechos como para examinar los sitios por donde pasaba. A la verdad, era harto probable que sus repetidas detenciones sólo tuvieran por objeto admirar más a su sabor los campos fertilísimos de aquel país privilegiado, y que debían tener mayor atractivo para él si como lo indicaban su tez blanca y sonrosada, sus ojos azules, y su cabello de oro había venido al mundo en una región del Norte.11

Chapter One

Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, late on a June afternoon a young man of handsome bearing journeyed on horseback through the picturesque country watered by the Tinima River and in leisurely fashion guided his spirited sorrel along the path known in these parts as the Cubitas Road, leading as it did to the villages of this name, which were also known as the red lands. The young man in question was four leagues from Cubitas, from whence he appeared to have come, and three from the city of Puerto Príncipe, at that time the capital of the central province of Cuba, though only a few years earlier it had been but a humble township.

Perhaps because of his scant knowledge of the road, perhaps because of the pleasure he took in appraising the landscape before him, the traveler gradually slackened his pace and from time to time reined in his horse as though to scrutinize the places through which he passed. Quite possibly his repeated stops had as their sole object the fuller savoring of the richly fertile earth of that privileged country, which most likely attracted him all the more if—as his fair, rosy skin, blue eyes, and golden hair seemed to indicate—he had been born in some northern region.12

Sab is a remarkably short title for a novel, and that in itself is a kind of manifesto. Tradition accorded established men in novel titles a first and last name (Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Jacopo Ortis) reserving first name alone for the young (Werther, Candide) or the female (Pamela, Julie, Corinne). Sab is neither young nor female, he is in fact very much established; but he is also enslaved, and hence, his identity is summed up in the title’s one three-letter word.

After a short preface, the opening scene focuses our gaze, and that bears investigation, because the young man we see on horseback is not Sab. What then do we learn in this opening extract? A variety of interconnected things. We learn both about this hero or protagonist, and about the island of Cuba. Let us begin with the hero. First, he is on horseback; since at least the three Tours of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, 1809–1821, being on horseback indicates status much as being on foot indicates its absence. The hero is at ease with his “spirited sorrel” because he has had time and leisure and occasion to become so. Indeed, his ease defines him: he slows his horse to gaze at Cuba as he passes—again, he has the leisure and the inclination to do that. The young man may be single, and from a northern and thus non-African region, but he is an admirer of Cuba’s “richly fertile earth,” and a reader of novels may guess that he will not remain single throughout.

Sab, we have yet to see, but he already hovers over the text thanks to the title, much as the namesakes of Racine’s plays tend only to surface later on. In brief, the novel features a love triangle in which the finally rather disappointing hero and the noble Sab love the same Cuban heiress, Carlota. It ends badly—the hero gets the girl—prefaced by Sab’s mad ride across Cuba to save the day, which stands in sharp contrast to the hero’s slow opening canter.

And what do we learn of Cuba in the opening? Cuba may be alien to the hero, but to everyone else here, it is home. Sab appeared in 1841, early in the story of Cuban literature as of Cuban abolitionism. The novel begins by situating events twenty years in the past; these were the latter years of Latin America’s wars of independence, though the wars barely touched Cuba. One might note that Sab is no less at home in Cuba than Carlota. In the extract, we see Cuba’s material progress—Puerto Principe is no longer a village—but political questions are elided. That is perhaps particularly evident in the remark about fertile fields, which require hands to tend them. The hero on his sorrel seems untroubled by such questions, but to Sab, who labors, they would be unavoidable. Cuba in 1821 as in 1841 ran a slave economy; it also happened that Spain, the colonial master, chose repression and torture to maintain its grip on the island, having already lost America south of the Rio Grande. Sab first appeared in Madrid, interestingly, after the author emigrated there from Cuba. But for the moment, Cuba is home, and that celebration of the local, of local color, is a fundamentally Romantic choice.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (23 March or 11 December 1814–1 February 1873), born in Puerto Principe (now Camagüey), Cuba, moved to Spain in 1836, then composing the poem “Al partir.” She published poetry in the press, meeting Ignacio de Cepeda y Alcalde in 1839, her great love. In 1841 appeared Avellaneda’s first volume of poems and her abolitionist novel Sab. She published more novels, theater, and poetry, 1841–1867. In 1844, her play Munio Alfonso was staged in Madrid; she met the poet Gabriel Garcia Tessara and became pregnant. In 1846, Avellaneda married don Pedro Sabate, who died the following year. In 1858, she staged her drama Baltasar. Married in 1856 to don Domingo Verduro, Avellaneda traveled with him to Cuba in 1859. He died in 1863 and she left Cuba, traveling to the United States and back to Spain in 1864.13

Ecuador (1 writer)

Dolores Veintimilla de Galindo (1829–23 May 1857), born in Quito, married Dr. Sixto Antonio Galindo y Oroña in 1847, moving to Guayaquil. Her husband later left for Central America and Veintemilla took up literature. After witnessing the shooting of an indigenous friend, she wrote Necrologia, condemning the death penalty and the treatment of indigenous people. The work was attacked so vehemently that she couldn’t leave the house. She committed suicide in 1857. Her other prose—Fantasia, Recuerdos—and poetry—“Quejas” [Complaints]—appeared after her death.14

Peru (1 writer)

Juana Manuela Gorriti

La Quena (1845)
La Cita

Las doce de la noche acababan de sonar en el reloj de la catedral de Lima. Sus calles estaban lóbregas y desiertas como las avenidas de un cementerio ; sus casas, tan llenas de luz y de vida en las primeras horas de la noche, tenian entonces un aspecto sombrío y siniestro ; y la bella ciudad dormia sepultada en un profundo silencio, interrumpido solo á largos intérvalos por los sonidos melancólicos de la vihuela de algun amante, ó por el lejano murmullo del mar que la brisa de la noche traia mezclado con el perfume de los naranjos que forman embalsamados bosques al otro lado de las murallas.

Un hombre embozado en una ancha capa apareció á lo lejos entre las tinieblas. Adelantóse rápidamente, mirando con precaucion en torno suyo, y deteniéndose delante de una de las rejas doradas de un palacio, paseó suavemente sus dedos por la celosía de alambre.

La celosía se entreabrió.15

The Quena
The Meeting

Midnight had just sounded on the cathedral clock in Lima. The streets were dark and deserted, like the rows of a cemetery. The houses, so full of light and life earlier in the evening had, by then, a somber and sinister aspect to them. The beautiful city was asleep, buried in a deep silence interrupted only occasionally by the melancholic sounds of some lover playing the vihuela, or by the distant murmuring of the sea, which the night breeze brought along with the fragrance of the orange trees that form aromatic forests outside the city’s walls.

A man appeared in the darkness, his face covered by his long cloak. He moved forward quickly, looking around him very carefully, and stopped before the golden railings of a palace window, where he ran his fingers softly over the latticework.

The latticed window opened.16

A quena is an Andean wooden flute, as a vihuela is a viol, an old Spanish stringed instrument. Gorriti has, rather nicely, used two musical instruments to locate and to date her story. As to the time of day, it is midnight, the witching hour, and our protagonist is caped like the heroes of the period’s romans de cape et d’épée. The short text thus opens with several Romantic tropes: local color, both in space and time; a Gothic setting, complete with the mention of a cemetery; and a cloaked hero coming to an assignation. One might add the orange trees that recall Goethe’s Mignon: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn,” Mignon sings, “Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?”17 It is a highly charged opening scene.

What do we learn in this opening extract? We learn some elements of plot—a caped man approaches a palace at midnight and is met—but we learn more about Lima: its cathedral, its streets and houses, its soundtrack, its orange trees, its palaces. We learn that the city is old enough for someone to have played the viol in its streets. If Romantic creation valued the local, Gorriti seems happy to oblige; not only does she set her text in Latin America, it is in fact specific to the city of Lima, which must have gladdened Peruvian hearts. And just as Němcová chose to reduce her readership by writing in the language of Bohemia and Moravia, so Gorriti’s text will remain, to a degree, alien to all who have not visited Peru. Who outside the Andes knows what a quena is? For a Peruvian, we find ourselves rather intimately at home; for the rest of the planet, we are confronted with the Other; and after all, these are two sides of the same coin, just as trash is packaging which has served its purpose. It is characteristic of Romantic thought, from Moscow to Montevideo, to value and empower what is individual and unique; Pope wrote that true wit was “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,” and that statement is antithetical to Romantic aesthetics.18 Lima is uniquely Lima, it is neither Paris nor Buenos Aires, and in that individuality, in that concert of unique identities, resides the polyphonic beauty of the world.

Finally, what does it mean to set a novel in the past? Europe’s Romantics loved to do so, from at least the time of Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814. If the Enlightenment project depends on a certain repudiation of the past—on a belief in progress and perfectibility—the historical novels typical of the Romantic period instead, or perhaps equally, find beauty and meaning in past societies and modes of life. It is the Romantic period that first found Racine anachronistic: A.W. Schlegel makes that reproach in the 1807 Comparaison des deux Phèdres, and what that anachronism represents is a failure of imagination, a failure in the end to allow other people to be Other, a narrowing of history. It matters to Gorriti that between the Inca Empire and independence lie three centuries of lived existence in Lima, as throughout Latin America, and she thus sets out to open a window onto them. In a sense, that insight matters more to this extract than the skeleton of plot it hangs on, whether the boy gets the girl. Boys get girls in countless stories; they do so less often in fictions set in colonial Peru.

Juana Manuela Gorriti (15 June 1818–6 November 1892), born in Rosario de la Frontera (Argentina), was exiled with her family in 1831. They went to Bolivia, where she married Manuel Isidro Belzú in 1833. President of Bolivia after 1848, he abandoned her after 1842, dying assassinated in 1865. In Bolivia, she founded a girls’ school. Gorriti spent some years in Lima, where she hosted tertulias [gatherings] for Peruvian writers, men and women, to discuss literature and social progress, and published La Quena, 1845, and other stories in the press. When the Spanish Navy shelled Lima in 1866, Gorriti served as a battlefield nurse. She returned to Argentina in 1878, founding a newspaper, La Alborada del Plata, in which she published on women’s rights and education. Her novels include El Pozo de Yocci [The Well of Yocci] in 1869 and La Tierra natal in 1889.19

Uruguay (1 writer)

Petrona Rosende (18 October 1787–28 January 1863), born in Montevideo (now Uruguay), moved to Buenos Aires during Montevideo’s occupation by Brazil. In Buenos Aires, she edited the feminist periodical La Aljaba from 1830 to 1831, becoming the first female journalist in Argentina. In 1835, Rosende returned to Montevideo, publishing a patriotic sonnet titled Al arribo de mi patria that year and opening a Casa de la Educación para Señoritas. She was granted a Uruguayan state pension in 1861.20

Costa Rica (0 writers)

I have identified zero Costa Rican women authors in this period. Further research clearly remains to be done.

El Salvador (0 writers)

I have identified zero Salvadoran women authors in this period. Further research clearly remains to be done.

Guatemala (0 writers)

I have identified zero Guatemalan women authors in this period. Further research clearly remains to be done.

Haiti (0 writers)

I have identified zero Haitian women authors in this period. Further research clearly remains to be done.

Honduras (0 writers)

I have identified zero Honduran women authors in this period. Further research clearly remains to be done.

Mexico (0 writers)

My initial research identified zero Mexican women authors in this period, but two subsequent discoveries throw this conclusion into question. First, Mónica Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2010). Díaz however indicates a single date after 1773: 1799, date of the first sermon eulogizing an indigenous nun, not a criolla. Reviewing her pre-1773 corpus, Díaz concludes that “most nuns’ texts, if they were printed at all, did not appear as originally written but were instead published under the name of a man and in a greatly modified style” (p. 90). One might then wish to consult manuscript sources held in Mexican convents, that seems a promising avenue for research. Some prominent genres in Díaz’s volume that one might look for include epistle and hagiography. Second, José Domingo Cortés, ed. Poetisas Americanas: Ramillete Poético del Bello Sexo Hispano-Americano (Paris: Bouret, 1896), which lists four Mexican women poets, as noted above, though none publishing prior to our cutoff date of 1848: Dolores Guerrero (1833–1858); Isabel A. Prieto de Landázuri (1833–1876); Mercedes Salazar de Cámara (who evidently did not exist); and Ester Tapia de Castellanos (1842–1897). In short, the absence of Mexican women writers in our initial search seems a function not of the field, but of the method adopted. This conclusion is likely to apply to all thirteen national traditions in this volume for which no names have been identified.

1 Enrique Williams Alzaga, Cartas que nunca llegaron: María Guadalupe Cuenca y la muerte de Mariano Moreno (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1967).
2 Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010).
3 Gustavo Jordán Ríos, María Josefa Mujía: Obra Completa: Poesía-prosa traducciones epistolario a Gabriel René Moreno (La Paz: Proyecto Sucre Ciudad Universitaria, 2009).
4 Nísia Floresta, Conselhos à minha filha, 2nd edn (Rio de Janeiro: F. de Paula Brito, 1845).
5 Translation reviewed by Luiza Duarte Caetano.

6 Rogério Budasz, Opera in the Tropics: Music and Theater in Early Modern Brazil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
7 Schuma Schumaher and Erico Vital Brazil, Dicionário mulheres do Brasil: de 1500 até a atualidade: com 270 ilustrações, 2nd edition (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2001).
8 Memoria Chilena (https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-channel.html).
9 Alejandra Araya Espinoza, Ximena Azúa Ríos et Lucía Invernizzi, Diálogos espirituales: manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI-XIX (Puebla: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006).
10 José Domingo Cortés, ed. Poetisas Americanas: Ramillete Poético del Bello Sexo Hispano-Americano (Paris: Vida de Charles Bouret, 1896).
11 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, ed. José Servera (Madrid: Cátedra, 1997), pp. 101–102.
12 Sab and Autobiography, tr. Nina M. Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 27.
13 Florinda Alzaga, La Avellaneda: Intensidad y vanguardia (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1997).
14 María Helena Barrera Agarwal, Dolores Veintimilla: más allá de los mitos (Quito: Academia Nacional de Historia del Ecuador, 2015).
15 In Sueños y realidades. Obras completas de Señora Doña Juana Manuela Gorriti, ed. Vicente G. Quesada (Buenos Aires: Casavalle, 1865), pp. 5–6.
16 Dreams and Realities Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti, tr. Sergio Waisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1.
17 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Roman (Munich: Goldmann, [1979]), p. 149.

18 Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) in Pope. Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 72.
19 Francine Masiello, ed. Dreams and Realities: Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti, tr. Sergio Gabriel Waisman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
20 MacIntyre, Iona, Women and Print Culture in Post-Independence Buenos Aires (Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2010).

5. Writers from Latin America and the Caribbean

Argentina (2 writers)

Bolivia (1 writer)

Brazil (2 writers)

Nísia Floresta

Advice to my Daughter

Chile (2 writers)

Colombia (1 writer)

Cuba (1 writer)

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Chapter One

Ecuador (1 writer)

Peru (1 writer)

Juana Manuela Gorriti

The Quena
The Meeting

Uruguay (1 writer)

Costa Rica (0 writers)

El Salvador (0 writers)

Guatemala (0 writers)

Haiti (0 writers)

Honduras (0 writers)

Mexico (0 writers)

Nicaragua (0 writers)

Paraguay (0 writers)

Venezuela (0 writers)

Nísia Floresta

Advice to my Daughter

Chapter One

The QuenaThe Meeting

The Quena
The Meeting