This European-based daughter of a Peruvian president wrote novels, essays, travel literature and a biography of her husband, the Guatemalan novelist Enrique Gómez Carrillo.

Her essays have recently begun to receive critical attention by scholars attempting to understand modernism from a gendered perspective.

After the Chileans departed, now General Cáceres served in a variety of functions, as a diplomat in Europe, president of the Republic, and then exiled after a bloody coup in 1895.

She was known to many of the major modernista authors including Amado Nervo, Rubén Darío and Enrique Gómez Carrillo, whom she married.

The central character of “La rosa muerta” accordingly falls for one of her gynecologists, allowing for scenes in the Paris clinic that must have been scandalous for the 1914 reading public.