TERESA JOSEFA DE MELLO BREYNER (1732-1794)

A woman of the Enlightenment: the writer Teresa Josefa de Mello Breyner (1732-1794, Countess of Vimieiro, by marriage), daughter of the 1st Countess of Ficalho, belongs to the cultural exception period in the 18th century. She was a friend of the Marquise of Alorna, who gave her the literary pseudonym Tirce, in the context of the New Arcadia movement, a Portuguese literary society inspired by the Italian Accademia dell’ Arcadia. Only one of his works is known, the tragedy Osmía, awarded a prize by the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1788 (submitted anonymously to a competition).

Osmía is the drama of a woman who questions the restrictions imposed on her gender. Teresa Josefa, according to researcher Raquel Bello Vázquez, was a transgressor, a woman who positioned herself in the “public space that clashes with the still-present prejudice against the three feminine virtues constructed as classic: silence, obedience, and chastity.”