Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant

Who was Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant?

Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant was a Brazilian juvenile writer. She was born in Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil to a British-Brazilian father and a Portuguese-Brazilian mother. In 1893, at the age of 12, Alice began a diary, an astute, and often amusing, chronicle of daily happenings among her family, servants, and the small mining town, Diamantina. The published diary ends in 1895. As an adult, Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant, by then a social figure in Rio de Janeiro, was married to the writer and also a president of the Banco do Brasil, who in 1942 encourage her to publish the diary that appeared as Minha vida de menina under the pseudonym Helena Morley. French Novelist Georges Bernanos admired it, and in the 1950s the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, then resident in Brazil, translated it into English as The Diary of Helena Morley.

The book was adapted to film in 2004 by Helena Solberg as Vida de Menina.