On January 12, at 6 p.m., the Nogueira da Silva Museum will host the presentation of the book "Biographies in the Feminine", Volume II of the Complete Works of Maria Ondina Braga, which has just been published by Imprensa Nacional with the support of Braga City Council. The presentation will be given by Helena Vasconcelos (journalist for Público) and Margarida Pereira (lecturer at UM - ELACH and researcher at CEHUM), with the participation of Luís Pipa (piano).
As well as bringing together the biographies of Women Writers, the volume also features the eight biographies of Portraits with Shadows, which has never been published before. Among the writers biographed are names such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Selma Lagerlöf, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Teresa Margarida Silva Orta, Irene Lisboa, Sei Shonagon, Anaïs Nin, Violette Leduc, Carson McCullers, George Eliot, Maria Archer, Ana Plácido and Rosalía de Castro. A total of twenty-two portraits of women who lived and wrote in different centuries and countries, all of them linked by courage and "inner strength", facing the hostility of the literary and social milieu, women of "a heroism that is not recorded in history, but perhaps more difficult than that of the Baker of Aljubarrota", the biographer points out.
The volume also reveals the results of an investigation that enabled the collection of various texts scattered in newspapers and magazines, published from April 1974 onwards. Of particular note is Maria Ondina Braga's collaboration with the magazine Modas e Bordados, which reveals not only a project of cultural citizenship undertaken by the author in the context of the change brought about by April 25, but also the constitution of a possible alternative, feminine and global "canon" that is still unparalleled in Portuguese literature today. "Biographies in the Feminine" also includes a significant number of unpublished texts that reveal an unknown side of the writer born in Braga, the most cosmopolitan Portuguese writer of the 20th century.
"Biographies in the Feminine" is edited by Isabel Cristina Mateus (University of Minho / Cehum) and Claire Williams (Oxford University - St Peter's College), and is the second volume published of a set of seven volumes scientifically coordinated by Isabel Cristina Mateus (University of Minho - CEHUM) and Cândido Oliveira Martins (Portuguese Catholic University - CEFH).
