Maria Isabel da Câmara Quental

Azorean poetess, full name Maria Isabel da Câmara Velho de Mello Cabral Quental do Canto, with Quental do Canto being from her husband, Artur de Quental, Antero's nephew and author of notes on the poet with important contributions to his biography, published posthumously (cf: «Notas póstumas» in Correio dos Açores, 11-9-1930). She was the sister of the short story writer Manuel da Câmara, mentioned elsewhere in this Dictionary. She wrote poetry «in secret» from the age of 16, but only when she was nearing 30 did her poetry begin to circulate in print, in newspapers, and she was over 50 when she published her first book (1942). She was a founding member (with Rodrigo Rodrigues, Humberto de Bettencourt, Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, and other Micaelense intellectuals) of the Instituto Cultural de Ponta Delgada (1943). Her work, in which themes and sentiments from the romantic inventory emerge, occupies a discreet place in the panorama of Azorean poetry, alongside other poets of her generation (i.e., born in the 1880s, such as Maria das Mercês do Canto Cardoso, António Franco, Rolando de Viveiros, etc.), who still represented in the second half of the current century the survival of a conventional romanticism that barely suffered the influence of Parnassian discipline and entirely ignored modern poetry, from Symbolism onwards.