Florbela Espanca dies in Matosinhos on her 36th birthday, 1930

In 1930 Florbela Espanca kept a diary in a hard-backed notebook covered in purple damask silk. She filled only the first 14 pages, with entries for a few days of every month except June. In December there is a single entry, dated the 2nd.1 source1 source

She was living in Matosinhos, on the coast just north of Porto, on Rua 1.º de Dezembro, with her third husband, a doctor named Mário Lage. She was still writing: three sonnets in her hand, now in a collection in Vila Viçosa, are dated October 1930. Guido Battelli, an Italian professor at the University of Coimbra, had agreed to sponsor the book of sonnets she had been unable to get published, Charneca em Flor.4 sources4 sources

She did not live to see it. Florbela Espanca died by suicide in the night of 7 to 8 December 1930. The records give the date of death as 8 December, her 36th birthday. She had been ill for years and in crisis for months. The book came out early in 1931.3 sources3 sources

She was born in Vila Viçosa, a town in the Alentejo, on 8 December 1894, and baptised Flor Bela Lobo, with her mother's surname only. Her mother, Antónia da Conceição Lobo, was a maid. Her father, João Maria Espanca, was an antique dealer and photographer whose studio in the town was called the Phot. Calypolense.4 sources4 sources

João Maria was married to another woman, Mariana do Carmo Inglesa Espanca, who was also Florbela's godmother; a copy of Mariana's will, made before her death in 1925, is among Florbela's papers. In 1897 Antónia had a second child, Apeles, Florbela's only brother. Antónia died in 1908. Florbela lived with her father and his wife, who treated her as one of their own.5 sources5 sources

The girl soon renamed herself. As a child she was already signing Florbela d'Alma da Conceição Espanca, joining her mother's name to her father's, and she used that name on verses of 1904 dedicated to him, No dia d'Annos (On the Birthday). He recognised her as his daughter only in 1949, eighteen years after her death.1 source1 source

Few girls went to secondary school in Portugal then, and Florbela did, at the lycée in Évora, the regional capital. Apeles went to the same city's Liceu André de Gouveia and then to the Naval School. Brother and sister stayed close all their lives.3 sources3 sources

On her 19th birthday, 8 December 1913, she married a schoolfriend, Alberto de Jesus Silva Moutinho. The couple went to live in Redondo, a small Alentejo town, where she taught languages, and she began signing herself Florbela Moutinho. In 1916 she sent a stitched booklet of eleven poems, Primeiros Passos, to the writer Raul Proença, hoping for his approval; he corrected it.3 sources3 sources

In 1917 she finished her secondary studies, and in October she enrolled in law at the University of Lisbon. Only fourteen women had entered the law faculty at that time. In the capital she met other poets and a group of women writers trying to make their names, and the poet Américo Durão became a friend.3 sources3 sources

Her first book, Livro de Mágoas (Book of Sorrows), appeared in 1919: 32 sonnets, printed by the Tipografia Maurício in a run of 200 copies that sold out quickly. Critics hardly noticed it. Its tone of lament owed much to António Nobre, the fin-de-siècle poet she took as a model.5 sources5 sources

The same year she suffered a miscarriage, and her health, physical and mental, began to fail. By 1920 she was living with António Guimarães, an artillery officer, while still married to Moutinho. The divorce came through in 1921, and she married Guimarães on 29 June 1921 in Porto.3 sources3 sources

Her second book, Livro de Sóror Saudade (The Book of Sister Saudade), followed in 1923. The title, Sister Saudade, came from her friend Américo Durão; saudade is the Portuguese word for longing. In November that year, ill again and after another miscarriage, she left her Lisbon home and Guimarães for good, perhaps in such haste that she left behind a bundle of manuscripts, letters and press cuttings. The state heritage institute, with the Gulbenkian Foundation, bought it in 1984, and it is now the Florbela collection of the Biblioteca Nacional.3 sources3 sources

Divorced from Guimarães, she married Mário Pereira Lage, a doctor, in Matosinhos in 1925. They settled there in 1926. She translated novels for the Porto publishers Civilização and Figueirinhas.3 sources3 sources

Apeles Demóstenes da Rocha Espanca graduated from the Naval School in 1917 and was promoted to first lieutenant in 1926. He sailed to Brazil and to the Belgian Congo, and in 1922 wrote to his sister from the cruiser Carvalho Araújo at Boma, in the Belgian Congo. He also painted in a modernist style, and some of his work appeared in the magazine Ilustração Portuguesa.2 sources2 sources

In 1927 he joined a pilots' course at the Naval Aviation Centre in Lisbon. On 6 June, during a training flight for his pilot's licence, his Hanriot seaplane crashed into the Tagus between Porto Brandão and Trafaria and sank. He was 30. His body was never found. Twenty-four days later Lisbon city council decided to name a street after him, Rua Tenente Espanca.1 source1 source

The loss left Florbela in deep despair. That year she wrote the eight stories of As Máscaras do Destino (The Masks of Fate), dedicated to him and opening with one called The Aviator. Death runs through all of them. She also wrote a sonnet for him, In memoriam, which ends with these lines.3 sources3 sources

After her death, newspapers and gossip claimed that her love for Apeles had been incestuous. Scholars treat the rumour as part of the scandal that grew up around her name, not as established fact.1 source1 source

Parts of 1930 went well. In June the Portuguese Red Cross awarded “D. Bela Lage” a medal of thanks for her work at the Festa da Flor, a charity flower day in Porto, the year before. She met Battelli, who decided to sponsor Charneca em Flor, and she kept the diary.3 sources3 sources

The diary is less of a confession than it looks. Renata Soares Junqueira, who has written on Florbela's theatricality, reads it as one more performance: in the first entry Florbela admits that her portrait of her own “mysterious, intangible, secret” self owes much to her pleasure in making phrases.1 source1 source

Her health was failing. That year doctors diagnosed pulmonary oedema, fluid in the lungs. Her mental health was worse, and by the autumn she was in deep despair. In the night of 7 to 8 December she took an overdose of sedatives, and she died.3 sources3 sources

The official cause of death was given as pulmonary oedema, and at least one reference work still calls the cause unclear. Most scholars, from the Camões Institute's essay to the Projeto Modernismo dictionary, describe it as suicide.4 sources4 sources

Charneca em Flor (Heath in Bloom) was published by the Livraria Gonçalves. It was a commercial success, and a second edition came out in April 1931, with 28 unpublished sonnets added under the title Reliquiae. The same year the Porto house Marânus published As Máscaras do Destino.2 sources2 sources

Battelli marketed the book on the back of her death. Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, the Brazilian scholar who has edited much of Florbela's work, says he used the suicide to draw readers and the press. It worked commercially, but newspapers began to dig into her private life, from her birth outside marriage to her bond with her brother. From then on, readers took her sonnets as autobiography.1 source1 source

That was a misreading, her modern critics argue. In each book she wore a mask: a princess waiting in a castle in Livro de Mágoas, a cloistered nun in Sóror Saudade, a sorceress in command of love in Charneca em Flor. The last book is also openly sensual about a woman's body, which was new in Portuguese poetry.2 sources2 sources

In the early 1930s a proposal to honour her with a bust in a public square set off a long, noisy argument in newspapers from north to south. The poet José Régio joined in, pointing to the originality of her verse. The sculptor Diogo de Macedo carved a marble bust in 1931.2 sources2 sources

It waited 18 years. Church and political authorities, local and national, refused it a public place until 1949, when it was finally set up in the Jardim Público of Évora. Dal Farra links the delay to the moral climate of the dictatorship, which held up the chaste, domestic woman as the ideal and branded Florbela a debauched one.2 sources2 sources

Florbela was buried in Matosinhos. Her return to Vila Viçosa was the work of a local association, the Grupo Amigos de Vila Viçosa, and of her widower. In July 1962 Mário Lage wrote from Lousada that he was willing to move her to a “worthy tomb” in her home town.1 source1 source

On 14 May 1964 the Porto police issued the permit to move her bones from Matosinhos's second cemetery to the cemetery of Vila Viçosa. Lage had written that he would be at the exhumation on the 16th. A black-bordered leaflet, apparently from Coimbra, asked the people of a “cultured city” to salute the coffin as it passed through.1 source1 source

On 17 May 1964 Vila Viçosa carried the urn to a mausoleum of its own in the municipal cemetery and unveiled a bust of her in the town park. The programme printed her poems beside tributes from writers including Mário Beirão, Américo Durão and Natércia Freire. Lage gave the association the papers and objects he had kept, which it still owns.1 source1 source

Universities were slow to follow her readers. The first dissertation on her work was written in Lisbon in 1945, and the second only in 1959, in Coimbra. Cláudia Pazos Alonso, now at Oxford, says that when she began researching Florbela in the late 1980s the poet was practically forgotten in Portuguese universities.1 source1 source

The change came through biography and through Brazil. The novelist Agustina Bessa-Luís's biography of 1979 treated Florbela as a character rather than reading her poems as a diary. Dal Farra, teaching in Brazil, tracked down in Portugal an early notebook of Florbela's poems and stories, and published it in 1994 as Trocando Olhares. Brazil's thesis catalogue records 59 academic works on Florbela between 1992 and 2020.2 sources2 sources

Outside the universities she never went away. The Brazilian singer Fagner made a hit of her sonnet Fanatismo in 1981, a feature film, Florbela, came out in 2012, and in 2020 President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa chose one of her poems to be read before the official speeches on 10 June, the Day of Portugal.1 source1 source

The towns she lived in have since honoured her. Matosinhos put up a bronze by Irene Vilar in 1981, and in 2025 Vila Viçosa added a statue in local marble by Francisco Simões, the start of a planned Florbela garden and trail that is to include her family's house.2 sources2 sources