This analytical piece examines Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho as a pioneering educator of women whose public achievements were shadowed by private difficulties: her father’s harsh criticism of her poetry and her husband’s betrayal. Drawing on the narratives of Margarida Vila-Nova, Maria João Lopo de Carvalho and Alexandre Borges, the article reassesses how a woman operating within a patriarchal literary culture came to be framed as 'a man of genius', and what that framing reveals about gender, authority and literary history.