Maria Firmina dos Reis was born in São Luís do Maranhão, on October 11, 1825, "natural daughter" of the freed slave Leonor Felippa dos Reis, having as her grandmother the also freed slave Engrácia Romana da Paixão and, as her uncle, the teacher, grammarian and philologist Sotero dos Reis, belonging to the white branch of the family and with a strong presence in the literate circles of the capital of Maranhão.
In 1847, she was approved in a public competition for the Chair of Primary Instruction in the village of São José de Guimarães, in the municipality of Viamão, located on the mainland and separated from the capital by São Marcos Bay, as recorded by her biographers Nascimento Morais Filho (1975) and Agenor Gomes (2022).
According to Morais Filho, upon retiring in the early 1880s, the author founded, in the town of Maçaricó, the first free mixed school in Maranhão and one of the first in the country. The feat caused great repercussion at the time and that is why the teacher was forced to suspend her activities after two and a half years.
The teacher was a constant presence in the local press, publishing poetry, fiction, chronicles and even riddles and riddles. According to Zahidé Muzart (2000, p. 264), “Maria Firmina dos Reis collaborated assiduously with several literary newspapers, such as A Verdadeira Marmota, Semanário Maranhense, O Domingo, O País, Pacotilha, O Federalista and others”.
Furthermore, she had a relevant participation as a citizen and intellectual throughout her ninety-two years of a life dedicated to reading, writing, researching and teaching. She worked as a folklorist, collecting and preserving cultural texts and oral literature, and also as a composer, being responsible for composing a hymn in praise of the abolition of slavery.
Firmina is the author of Úrsula, published in 1859, but only published in the following year. A revolutionary book for its time, it is the first abolitionist novel written by women in the Portuguese language; and, possibly, the first novel published by a black woman in all of Latin America. The narrative addresses the problem of the slave trade and the regime as a whole from the point of view of the subject enslaved and transformed into "human merchandise". The author brings Africa to the emerging Brazilian fiction as a space of civilization and freedom. And she denounces European traffickers as "barbarians", thus opposing Hegelian thought aimed at justifying slave colonization as a civilizing enterprise. And well before Castro Alves' "Navio Negreiro", she denounces the mistreatment to which enslaved people were subjected in the "tumbeiros", true tombs for many who could not resist.

In 1861, the author released Gupeva in serial form, a short narrative with an Indian theme, published in chapters in the local press, and with new reissues throughout the 1860s.

Her volume of poems Cantos à Beira-mar, whose first edition is from 1871, brings texts marked by strong restlessness and a female subjectivity that is sometimes melancholic in the face of the 19th century reality marked by the dictates of slave patriarchy and also represented as a problem in the face of sensitivity. of the author.

Defender of abolition, in 1887 she published the short story "The Slave" in the press, an abolitionist text committed to inserting itself as a piece of rhetoric in the debate then taking place in the country surrounding the abolition of the servile regime.

Maria Firmina dos Reis died in 1917, poor and blind, in the municipality of Guimarães. Unfortunately, many of her personal archive documents have been lost and to date there is no news of any photos of her from that time. By the way, a portrait of the Rio Grande do Sul writer Maria Benedita Borman, pseudonym "Délia", circulates on the internet, as if it were the author from Maranhão.

Starting in 2017, on the occasion of the centenary of Firmina's death, her books have been re-released: Úrsula, now with around thirty reis