NATÉRCIA CAMPOS:

HOW BEING A BRAZILIAN NORTHEASTERN WOMAN AND A GREAT MALE WRITER’S DAUGHTER CAN MITIGATE THE SHINE OF AN EMERGING LITERARY FEMALE FIGURE

Abstract

Natércia Campos, an award-winning female writer from Ceará – despite her relatively short literary career –, in spite of her privileged birth, is still quite unknown by the reading public – even in Ceará, her birthplace. Using her own unique way of narrating, she left her indelible mark on short stories, some fictional works with a travel content and a novel: A Casa (1999) – which is our corpus in this basic, qualitative and exploratory research. The bibliographic survey we carried out here aimed to answer the research question: With so many credentials and merits, why is Natércia Campos not widely known by readers throughout Brazil and abroad, as her fellow countrywomen and contemporaries? In our eagerness to answer it, in this article, we base our theoretical debate on Cavalcante (2012), Lima (2009) and Freire (2022), among other researchers. We conclude that among the factors that led to her obfuscation, there was the fact that she was one of the brilliant writer Moreira Campos’ daughters, besides the facts that she began as a writer late in her life, and that she wrote fantastic literature praising the Northeast of Brazil – a region underestimated in political, social and economic terms.