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    The Diary of “Helena Morley”
    The Diary of “Helena Morley”
    The Diary of “Helena Morley”
    Ebook366 pages5 hours

    The Diary of “Helena Morley”

    By Helena Morley

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    About this ebook

    Originally published in 1942 under the title Minha Vida de Menina—Portuguese meaning “My Life as a Little Girl or “Young Girl”—this book is a diary that was kept by the author, Helena Morley (pseudonym of Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant), when she was between the ages of twelve and fifteen (1893-1895), and living in Diamantina, a small diamond mining town in southeastern Brazil.

    The little girl describes her homework, her love of parades and dresses, her father who could scarcely make a living in the mines, and her most beloved grandmother.

    The diary was admired by French Novelist Georges Bernanos, and in 1957, award-winning American poet and writer Elizabeth Bishop, then resident in Brazil, translated it into English as The Diary of Helena Morley.

    “The more I read the book [Minha Vida de Menina ]the better I liked it. The scenes and events it described were odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true. The longer I stayed on in Brazil the more Brazilian the book seemed, yet much of it could have happened in any small provincial town or village, and at almost any period of history—at least before the arrival of the automobile and the moving-picture theatre.”—Elizabeth Bishop
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHauraki Publishing
    Release dateOct 27, 2016
    ISBN9781787202351
    The Diary of “Helena Morley”
    Author

    Helena Morley

    ALICE DAYRELL CALDEIRA BRANT (August 28, 1880 - June 20, 1970) was a Brazilian juvenile writer. She was born in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil to a British-Brazilian father and a Portuguese-Brazilian mother. In 1893, at the age of 12, Alice began a diary: an astute, and often amusing, chronicle of daily happenings among her family, servants, and the small mining town, Diamantina. The published diary ends in 1895. As an adult, Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant, by then a social figure in Rio de Janeiro, was married to the writer and also a president of the Banco do Brasil ("Bank of Brazil"), who in 1942 encouraged her to publish the diary that appeared as Minha Vida de Menina under the pseudonym Helena Morley. She died in 1970 in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 89. ELIZABETH BISHOP (1928-79) was one of the greatest, most beloved American poets and short-story writers of the twentieth century. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949-1950 and the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956. Born an only child in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop received a substantial traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951 and decided to travel to South America. On her arrival in Santos, Brazil that year, Bishop expected to stay two weeks but ended up staying 15 years. Her first book, North & South (1946) won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. The follow-up volume, Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring won Bishop the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her next major publication was The Complete Poems (1969), which won a National Book Award, and her last new book of poems to appear in her lifetime was Geography III (1977), which won Bishop the Neustadt International Prize for Literature—an award no woman had won before, and no other American has won since. She died in 1979 at the age of 68.

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    • 3/5
      Beginning in 1893, the exuberant twelve year old Alice Dayrell started a diary. English on her father's side, but Brazilian through her mother's, she writes of the everyday occurrences that made up her life in Diamantina, Brazil: the squabbling and eccentric relatives and neighbours; her beloved grandmother; helping with the household chores; attending church; school with its pressures (she hopes to become a teacher); fits of giggles at the most inopportune times.I loved the account of dinner at Dona Elvira's:'Lunchtime came, she opened the cupboard and took out a deep crockery dish with only one handle that I found very strange. But as it happened quickly, no one noticed. When she brought the canjica from the kitchen and put it on the table, we looked at one another in bewilderment. Never in my life have I seen a dish of THAT sort in the dining room. Everybody ate the canjica except me. I excused myself by saying I didn't like it. When we left, Naninha said to me, "Silly, it was your loss. Didn't you see that she thinks that's a dish for food?" 'We are immersed in a very alien world. Father is away working at the diamond mines; money is short; slavery has just been stopped but there is an ambiguous relationship between blacks and whites -Alice queries why she should be disapproved of for playing with her black schoolmates. Although she attends church, she mentions her own doubts. Sickness and death and possible incidences of witchcraft interrupt her life.Even such everyday items as clocks are a rarity. Living by the sun and the roosters, mistakes occur, such as the time Mama wakes her up for early Mass and is stopped by a soldier querying where they're going:'Mama said "Midnight? I thought it was four o'clock. Thankyou very much for the information." 'A lovely entertaining glimpse into a foreign world through the eyes of an endearing young girl.
    • 5/5
      Helena (Alice) is hilarious and clever and insightful. Her mind is so open and awake for a kid so young. This diary is really a time capsule of the time and of her life in minas gerais, brazil. Reading of the deaths that often occurred at the time, deaths caused by gangrene, tooth infections, tuberculosis, poisonings and fames canina (bulimia!) and there being no doctor that can help because it’s 1890 something and dentists and doctors knew hardly much. The people in her life were real and it’s a little sweet and sad to know of their existence but not of how all their lives ended up. Helena’s grandmother seems amazing and so loved and I’m always in tears upon reading of her passing. Life is simple and seems beautiful and also riddled with racism. I don’t know how I forgot about it the first time I read the book, but this time reading especially, learning of the African Brazilians who still knew their native languages, hearing of the many black boys and girls alive at the time, they all seem alive and funny and maybe because this is Helena’s childhood, life seems, not rosy, but romantic and exceedingly impressive when all you have to entertain yourself is the people around you. Helena was a very bold, outspoken kid. She seems so grown up and like she was born knowing herself and her opinions. She was a virgo. It’s a very true document of Brazilian life at the time. The hardcopy version has pictures of Helena and some family, I definitely recommend picking up a copy of that. I wish Helena’s husband had let her publish her journals from when she got older because she still wrote often as an adult and I wanna hear it, I wanna know! I do love this book.

    Book preview

    The Diary of “Helena Morley” - Helena Morley

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