Judith Teixeira (1880–1959) is the first bisexual woman poet known to have written openly as such in Portugal. Over the course of ten years, from 1918 to 1927, she published three volumes of poetry, two novellas, a manifesto or apologia, and other pieces that appeared individually in newspapers or magazines.[1] In 1925, she also founded and edited a literary review, Europa, of which only a few issues survive.[2] She is significant not only as a “first” in literary history but also, perhaps even more so, as a “second”—her citations of Renée Vivien, the pen name of the lesbian poet Pauline Tarn (1877–1909), offer hope that further connections and continuities among lesbian and bisexual women writers are waiting to be found.[3]

Judith Teixeira’s third and last published poetry collection, Núa: Poemas de Bysâncio, 2nd edition (Lisbon: J. Rodrigues, 1926).

            Despite an outpouring of editions, translations, and literary analysis, remarkably little is known about the life Judith actually lived.[4] The timeline established in 1996 by Maria Jorge and Luis Manuel Gaspar and supplemented in 2002 by René Pedro Garay has remained, for over two decades, the bulk of Judith’s biography.[5] Of course, this is partly because Judith died a widow and childless, without leaving a testament, under a conservative, totalitarian regime. Few would have wished to preserve information about the men or (especially) the women she loved, let alone unearth it. The survival of a notebook of handwritten drafts and a short story in typescript, which Cláudia Pazos Alonso purchased in 1997 from J. C. Silva, owner of the Livraria Histórica e Ultramarina, is a miracle.[6]

            In October 2025, after consulting the digitized finding aids in the Consulta Real em Ambiente Virtual (CRAV), I visited the Portuguese National Archive and the National Library in Lisbon and found a treasure trove. This article summarizes my discoveries with respect to Judith’s childhood and upbringing, the events that led to the end of her first marriage, and two legal actions that nearly ended the second. Most significantly, I can now confirm that Judith was bisexual in life as well as art, as I have found the name of at least one woman with whom she conducted a love affair. This woman, Olga de Moraes Sarmento (May 26, 1881–December 1948), eventually became the lover of Hélène van Zuylen, whose role in the life of Pauline Tarn leads us back to the work of Renée Vivien. This confirmation of Judith’s bisexuality has major implications not only for the study of Judith Teixeira’s literary works but also for bisexual women’s history and sapphic history, which includes lesbians, bisexual women, and women-aligned nonbinary people who are attracted to women and/or to women-aligned people of their own gender.  

Judith Teixeira’s second poetry collection, Castelo de Sombras (Lisbon, 1923).

List of Judith Teixeira’s published and forthcoming works, on the jacket of Núa (1926). Labareda and Taça de Brasas have been lost.

Notes

[1] Judith Teixeira’s surviving books are Decadencia, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Libanio da Silva, 1923); Castelo de Sombras (Lisbon, 1923); Núa: Poemas de Byâncio (Lisbon: J. Rodrigues, 1926); De Mim: Conferência em que se explicam as minhas razões sobre a Vida, sobre a Estética, sobre a Moral (Lisbon: J. Rodrigues, 1926); and Satânia: Novelas (1927). The flyleaf of Núa lists two forthcoming volumes, Labareda: Drama en 3 actos, Prosa and Taça de Brasas: Versos, which may never have been published. The following pieces appeared under the pen name Lena de Valois: “Almas simples (Fé),” Jornal da tarde, 21 October 1918, 1; “Lali,” Jornal da tarde, 18 October 1918, 2; “A pobre mais pobrezinha,” Diário de Lisboa, 17 October 1921, 3; “Enleio,” Diário de Lisboa, 9 November 1921; “Sonetilho,” Diário de Lisboa, 9 November 1921; “Quero-te Bem,” Diário de Lisboa, 24 November 1921; “Sonho,” Diário de Lisboa, 24 November 1921. All are cited in Cátia Cânedo and Fabio Mario da Silva, “Lena de Valois, a primeira Judith Teixeira,” Entheoria: Caderno de letras e humanas 10, no. 2, 100 anos de Judith Teixeira, ed. Fabio Mario da Silva, Isa Severino, and Maria Lúcia Dal Farra (July/December 2023): 116–30, esp. 130.

[2] Three volumes of Europa, from April, May, and June 1925, have been digitized and are available at “Modernism: Arquivo virtual da Geração de Orpheu,” https://modernismo.pt/index.php/europa.

[3] The citations appear in the epigraph to Núa, n.p., and in De Mim. For a detailed analysis of Renée Vivien’s significance in the works of Judith Teixeira, see Samantha Pious, “ ‘I Dream of Love and Yet I Sleep Alone’: Judith Teixeira, Reader of Renée Vivien,” Entheoria 10, no. 2 (July/December 2023), special issue (100 anos de Judith Teixeira): 97–115.

[4] Editions: Poemas, ed. Maria Jorge (Lisbon: Edições Culturais do Subterrãneo, 1996); Poesia e prosa, ed. Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Fabio Mario da Silva (Alfragide: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2015); Obras completas: Lírica, ed. Martim Gouveia e Sousa, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Edições Esgotadas, 2019). Translations: René Pedro Garay, Judith Teixeira: O modernism sáfico português (Lisbon: Universitária Edição, 2002), a study with translations into English and Spanish; Carlos Sanrune, trans., Desnuda: Antología de poesía sáfica de Judith Teixeira (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Amistades Particulares, 2018); Judith Teixeira, Cactus Flowers: Selected Poems, trans. Samantha Pious (Sequim, WA: Headmistress Press, 2025), verse translations; Judith Teixeira, Manifestos and Prose Fiction, ed. Fabio Mario da Silva and Chris Gerry (Receife: Editoria Universitária da UFRPE, 2025), a study with prose translations by Chris Gerry; Judith Teixeira, “The Statue,” trans. Richard Zenith, Poetry (April 2007): 42–43; Judith Teixeira, “My Scarlet Quilt,” trans. Lesley Saunders, in “Portuguese and Brazilian Poetry” (blog post), The High Window, 7 March 2017, https://thehighwindowpress.com/2017/03/07/portuguese-and-brazilian-poetry-thw5-draft. The studies, too many to count, include: Anna M. Klobucka, “Palmyra’s Secret Garden: Iberian (Dis)Connections, Portuguese Modernism, and the Lesbian Subject,” Luso-Brazilian Review 50, no. 2 (2013): 31–52; Sara Marina Barbosa, “Quem tramou Judith Teixeira? (Uma história com fantasmas),” Estrema: Revista interdisciplinar de humanidades 4 (October 2014): www.estrema-cec.com; Letticia Batista Rodrigues Leite, “Judith Teixeira, leitora de Safo?” Anais do III colóquio internacional: Literatura e gênero: Sujeitos de gênero, escritos e outras linguagens, ed. Algemira de Macedo Mendes, Assunção de Maria Sousa e Silva, and Diógenes Buenos Aires de Carvalho (Teresina: EDUFPI – Campus Torquato Neto, 2017), 376–80; Maria Jesús Fariña Busto, “El beso deseado de tu boca: Nombres y voces para una ginealogía lesbiana (España y Portugal, primeras décadas del siglo veinte),” Investigaciones feministas 10, no. 1 (2019): 79–96; Ana Raquel Fernandes, “A Poetics of Resistance: Four Exceptional Voices in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century Portugal,” in Beyond Binaries: Sex, Sexualities and Gender in the Lusophone World, ed. Paulo Pepe and Ana Raquel Fernandes (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 123–47;

Many others are collected in: Fabio Mario da Silva, Annabela Rita, Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, Ana Luisa Vilela, and Ana Maria Oliveira, eds., Judith Teixeira: Ensaios críticos no centenârio do modernismo (Visesu: Edições Esgotadas, 2017); Fabio Mario da Silva, Isa Severino, and Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, eds., 100 anos de Judith Teixeira, special issue of Entheoria: Caderno de letras e humanas (July/December 2023).

[5] Judith Teixeira, Poemas, ed. Maria Jorge, 227–54; René Pedro Garay, Judith Teixeira, 25–30.

[6] Cláudia Pazos Alonso, “Um caderno com poemas inéditos de Judith Teixeira: Apresentação e conclusões preliminares,” in Judith Teixeira, Poesia e prosa, 205–214; Fabio Mario da Silva, “O manuscrito de Saudade,” in Judith Teixeira, Poesia e prosa, 253–54.