As a ″privileged free black woman within nineteenth-century colonial slave society″, Maria Firmina dos Reis ″stands out because she was very well-educated and a vigorous opponent of slavery″.[7] Dawn Duke considers Maria Firmina dos Reis, together with Cuban writer María Dámasa Jova Baró, ″as eminent precursors to a distinguished line of subsequent women writers″ in the Afro-Latin American context.[8] ″Horácio de Almeida believed Maria Firmina dos Reis to be the first Brazilian woman writer. [...] Luiza Lobo has since opposed the allegation by presenting Ana Eurídice Eufrosina de Barandas of Porto Alegre as the first female Brazilian novelist.″[8] But the ″long-term symbolic value of Maria Firmina dos Reis's only novel Úrsula (1859) rests in its distinction as a work that lays the foundations for an Afro-Brazilian female literary consciousness.″[9] For Rita Terezinha Schmidt, ″Maria Firmina dos Reis inscribes a black voice in the construction of national subjectivities engendering what Homi Bhabha defines as a counter narrative of the nation that “continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological maneuvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities”″.[10]