Clarice Lispector Biography

Clarice Lispector (leh-SPEHKT-ur) is considered not only one of Brazil’s most innovative writers but also one of the giants of twentieth century fiction. Born in 1925 in the Ukraine, she emigrated to Brazil with her parents and two older sisters when she was two months old. The family settled first in the Northeast of Brazil but moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1937. From the time she was a child, Lispector read widely, starting with Brazilian classics such as José de Alencar, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Graciliano Ramos, and gradually adding such foreign writers as Fyodor Dostoevski, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. While attending the National Faculty of Law, she began a career in journalism, developed close friendships with several of Brazil’s leading writers, and started work on the novel Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1944 and was awarded the Brazilian PEN Club’s prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. A surprisingly mature first novel, this probing, anguished tale centering on a woman’s search for self-identity set the direction that the author’s fiction was to follow for the next thirty years.

In 1943, the year before she finished law school, Lispector married her classmate Mauri Gurgel Valente, who joined the Brazilian diplomatic corps upon their graduation. For the next fifteen years, Lispector accompanied her diplomat husband to posts in Europe and the United States. During that time, Lispector wrote two more novels and turned her attention increasingly to the short story, a genre in which she was to set new standards of excellence. After she was separated from her husband in 1959, Lispector returned with the couple’s children to Rio de Janeiro, her home for the rest of her life. The late 1950’s and the early 1960’s were extremely creative periods, during which Lispector produced perhaps her most accomplished work. Two thematically complex and stylistically innovative novels, The Apple in the Dark and The Passion According to G. H., date from these years. Written in a slow-moving, poetic prose, they are evidence that, by this time, Lispector had achieved a thorough command of narrative technique and had matured into one of the most sophisticated practitioners of the “lyrical novel.” It was also during this period that Lispector published what are arguably her two...

Clarice Lispector was born in the tiny Ukrainian village of Chechelnik on December 10, 1925, while her family was emigrating from the Soviet Union to Brazil. The family settled in the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil before moving to Rio de Janeiro, when Lispector was twelve years old. A precocious child, Lispector began composing stories as early as age six, even attempting to have them published in a local newspaper. A voracious reader in general and a devotee of writers such as Hermann Hesse and Katherine Mansfield in particular, it was a well-read Clarice Lispector who enter the National Faculty of Law in 1940, from which she was graduated in 1944. While in law school, she first took a job on the editorial staff of the...

Clarice Lispector was born in Chechelnik, in the Ukraine, in 1925, of Jewish parents. The family moved to Brazil when she was two months old. Lispector attended school first in Recife, then in Rio de Janeiro. In 1943, she graduated from the Faculty of Law in Rio. She married a diplomat and lived in Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States for many years. After she and her husband divorced, she settled permanently in Rio de Janeiro in 1959. She died from cancer in 1977.