Sacrificio y recompensa is the first Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera work ever published. Entered in the literary contest organized by the Ateneo de Lima in 1886, it earned its author the gold medal. The publication in 1887 meant for Mercedes Cabello her recognition by the Lima society as a writer, and the preliminary hints of a style and attitude vis-a-vis the society that would become exacerbated in her other writings, Los amores de Hortensia (1886); Eleodora (1887); specially in Blanca Sol (Novela social) (1888) and Las consecuencias (1890); and El conspirador (1892). There is a character in...

Los amores de Hortensia, that initiates the cycle of novels by Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (1842-1909), owes some of its characters' attributes of extreme sensibility, beauty and intelligence to the longevity of Romanticism in Latin America during the nineteenth-century. Yet, the protagonist's search for independence, her intellectual superiority, and above all, her lucid understanding of the dynamics of gender and class within the asphyxiating atmosphere of Lima's upper-crust society, transgress the limits of the romantic heroine and plant her firmly in the tradition of the naturalistic...