Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta is unquestionably one of the most significant women writers of the early and mid-nineteenth century in Brazil, if not the most significant. Her output was prolific, including eight publications in Brazil, some running to several editions and subsequently translated into French and Italian, a further five publications in Europe, and a number of collaborations in newspapers in Rio de Janeiro and possibly elsewhere. Yet despite leaving this considerable literary legacy, even before her death in France in 1885 Floresta's life and work was surrounded by myth and misinformation. Although much has been done to reveal the details of her biography, the hagiographic construction of the writer and her work, which still persists even within the more recent scholarly context of the ‘rediscovery’ of nineteenth-century women's literature, has continued to foster some of the most fundamental myths upon which her position in the Brazilian canon is founded. Moreover, this hagiographical approach has hindered an objective analysis of Floresta's work, and it is essentially this imbalance that I wish to address in this study, by instigating a disinterested re-evaluation of the place the writer occupies in the Brazilian canon and of the many claims that are made for her work.

Floresta was born Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto on 12 October 1810 in Papari, in the north-eastern province of Rio Grande do Norte. The pseudonym by which she was known in Brazil and Europe throughout her adult life was of her own making, although it was not employed with a view to literary anonymity.