Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer.

She was born in the village of Chichelnyk in Ukraine on December 10, 1920. In 1921, the family — mother, father, two-month-old Clarice, and her two sisters — moved to Brazil, to the city of Maceió, in the state of Alagoas. Three years later the family moved to Recife, in the state of Pernambuco. Throughout her childhood the family experienced severe financial difficulties. At the age of nine, Clarice lost her mother.

In 1928 she began attending João Barbalho School, where she learned to read. In 1931 she took the entrance exam and enrolled in gymnasium. At the age of nine she was already writing short stories, all of which were rejected by the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco, which at the time devoted one page to children’s writing. The reason was that, unlike other children’s stories, Clarice’s stories contained no plot or facts — only impressions. In 1934 the family moved to Rio de Janeiro.

From 1937 Clarice worked as a private Portuguese tutor. The teacher-student relationship would become one of the main and recurring themes throughout her work, beginning with her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. In 1939 she entered the National Faculty of Law in Rio de Janeiro. In 1940 she worked as an editor at the National Agency in Rio de Janeiro. In 1941 she worked as an editor at the newspaper A Noite in Rio de Janeiro, where she published some of her stories.

In 1943 she completed her law course. That same year she married a fellow student, Maury Gurgel Valente. Her husband began a diplomatic career. In 1944 she published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. The young family moved to Europe in the midst of World War II, where the writer’s husband had been sent to work. Even when leaving Brazil, Clarice felt torn between the need to accompany her husband and the desire to be with her family and friends. Upon arriving in Italy after a month on the road, she wrote: “Truth be told, I do not know how to write travel letters; truth be told, I do not know how to travel either.” During World War II she helped in a