Maria Archer

Maria Emilia Archer Eyrolles Baltasar Moreira, known to her readers as Maria Archer (4 January 1899 – 23 January 1982), was a writer and activist from Lisbon, Portugal. Biography Born in Lisbon, Archer lived most of her life outside of Portugal. As a result of her parents' frequent journeys with their children, she did not finish elementary school until she was much older than normal students making her essentially a self-taught writer. Reportedly, she started creating verse as a young child although no evidence of those poems remain. In 1910, her parents moved the family to Mozambique, Africa. She was the first-born of six children. The family returned to Portugal in 1914, but two years later they were back in Africa, this time in Guinea-Bissau. In 1921, while her father was on a trip to Portugal, Maria Archer married a Portuguese man, Alberto Teixeira Passos and the young couple took up residence on the island of Ibo in Mozambique. Five years later, after the fall of the democratic regime there and the subsequent crisis, her husband lost his job at a bank and the two moved to Faro, Portugal. In 1931, the marriage ended and they divorced.