Cora Coralina

Ana Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto Bretas left school after the third year and was told, as girls of her town and time were told, that this was enough. She married, moved to São Paulo, had six children, was widowed, and supported the family by selling books door to door and then by baking and selling sweets. She wrote all along, in notebooks, without publishing, for more than fifty years.

At seventy-one she returned to the old colonial town of Goiás and to the house she was born in, and at seventy-five she brought out her first collection, Poems from the Alleys of Goiás. The poems are made of what she had actually lived: washerwomen, stone streets, the river that floods, prostitutes she refused to look down on, and the plain fact of being an old woman who is still working. Brazil took to her completely in the last decade of her life. She died at ninety-five and is buried in her town; her house is now a museum, and the sweets she sold are still made there from her recipes.