A native of Slavonia, Truhelka worked as teacher and headmistress in Osijek, Zagreb, Gospić, Banja Luka, and Sarajevo.

[3] In 1901, Truhelka moved to Banja Luka, in the Austro-Hungarian-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina, where she worked as a girls' school headmistress for ten years.

In 1900, Jagoda Truhelka and Marija Jambrišak launched the magazine Domaće ognjište (The Home Hearth), which attracted significant contribution from other women writers.

[3] Truhelka was at that time at the centre of a network of female activists in Zagreb, and ran a joint household with one of those women for 30 years.

[5] As her early prose revolved around women and the relations between the sexes, Truhelka published a part of her stories in the magazines Vienac and Nada under the pseudonym A. M.

[6] Most were simple love stories set in contemporary Zagreb or Vienna, but with a prominent psychological development of female characters.

[3] Truhelka was the first Croatian author to feature a female character who is a feminist and who is intellectually superior to others[6] rather than simply idealized or demonized.

[6] The literary critic Lidija Dujić described Truhelka's female characters as unconvincing, with the exception of the protagonist of Plen air.

Plen air, now a largely forgotten novel, features the artist Zlata Podravac, who stands out because of her intellect.