Biography

by Mónica Ganhão

Maria Peregrina de Sousa, daughter of the merchant António Ventura de Azevedo e Sousa and Maria Margarida de Sousa Neves, was born on the February 13, 1809, in Porto, in the north of Portugal, at the time of the second French invasion. She had a difficult beginning to her life as her family had to escape general Soult’s troops when she was but a newborn. That is the reason for her middle name “Peregrina” (“Pilgrim”), which her uncle gave her due to this early “pilgrimage.”

As she confessed to António Feliciano de Castilho (1800-1875), a fellow writer, in the autobiographical letters she sent him, and which he later published in 1861 in Revista Contemporânea de Portugal, it was her father who taught her how to read very early in life. He would, however, later decide to impose rules regarding how much time she could devote to reading. According to him, reading and other “entertainments” should be seen as a pastime and not as her main occupation. The novels she was allowed to read were also selected by her mother who forbid the ones that she considered “immoral.”

She began writing at the age of fourteen due to her love for riddles and letters that she would emulate from the examples she found in the novels she read. Around the age of twenty she learned French, which she claims was the skill that opened the door to vaster studies. It was also at about this time that she first tried writing novels and stories (without attempting to publish them). Later, upon moving from Porto to Moreira, a rural area, writing became a more frequent activity for her, something that, in her autobiographical letters, she calls “work.”

During most of her life, she lived with her family between Moreira and Leça da Palmeira (another northern rural town in Portugal), until the date of their deaths; she never married. Moreira also happens to be the place where Castilho first met her, while she lived with her father and sister, following the deeply grieved passing of their mother.

The course of Maria Peregrina de Sousa’s life until 1861 reaches us through her own hand in the autobiographical letters that her friend António Feliciano de Castilho decided to publish. After that date, all we know is that, according to Alberto Pimentel (1905), she took shelter with relatives when her sister died (the last surviving member of her nuclear family), and that Maria Peregrina de Sousa vanished from the social world, abandoning writing. She died on November 16, 1894, in Porto, seemingly lonely and disheartened after having seen all of her family members pass away before her. Her life path leads us to the question: was the fact that she remained single one of the reasons for the unusual freedom to study and write that she enjoyed?

[More to come soon ...]