Silva e Orta, Teresa M. da (c. 1711–1793)
Silva e Orta, Teresa M. da (c. 1711–1793)
Brazilian-born novelist. Name variations: Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta; (pseudonym) Dorothea or Dorotéia Engrássia Tavareda Dalmira. Born c. 1711 in São Paulo, Brazil; died 1793 in Portugal; dau. of José Ramos da Silva and Catarina Horta; sister of Matias Aires Ramos da Silva (writer); m. Pedro Jansen von Praet.
Moved with family to Portugal (1716); married at 16 against wishes of family and was disinherited; one of the leading intellectual women in Portugal, wrote a study on the expulsion of Jesuits from Brazil and Portugal; under the name Dorotéia Engrássia Tavareda Dalmira, wrote the political and philosophical roman à clef, Máximas de Virtude e Formosura de Tebas, Venceram os Mais Apertados Lances da Desgraça (Maximas of Virtue and Beauty with which Diófanes, Climeneia and Hemirena, Princes of Thebes, Overcame the Most Rigorous Trials of Adversity, 1752), the only anti-absolutist work published in Portugal in this period. A 2nd edition was published as Aventuras de Diófanes; by the 3rd edition the title page attributed the work to the diplomat Alexandre de Gusmão; it was not until Ernesto Enes wrote a definitive biography of her in 1938 that her authorship was acknowledged.