[4] Completing her secondary education, Spínola enrolled in teacher's college at the Instituto Normal Central para Señoritas Belén graduating with her teaching credentials.

[5] In 1915, Spínola wrote her first story, entitled Nubia and sent it to Revista Guatemala Informativa,[6] where it was reviewed and accepted by Carlos Wyld Ospina, Virgilio Rodríguez Beteta and Máximo Soto Hall.

She quickly had five children, but lost a pair of twins and a baby, leaving her with her daughter, Lilian Eugenia, the oldest, and a son, Rafael, named after her father.

[7] Under the presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, Aguilar's family was persecuted and pushed into exile, first to El Salvador, then Honduras, and finally to Nicaragua.

In 1925, inspired by successes in suffrage by women in England, France, and United States Spínola joined with Romelia Alarcón, Laura Bendfeldt, María Albertina Gálvez, Clemencia de Herrarte, Gloria Menéndez Mina, Adriana de Palarea, and Graciela Quan to form the Comité Pro-Ciudadanía to fight for Guatemalan women's suffrage.

She was disappointed, but entered another contest in December 1929 and won the prize and a monetary award, allowing her to spend Christmas in León with her husband.

Three months later, on 27 March 1930, Aguilar graduated with his doctorate in law and returned to Guatemala, joining the cabinet of the newly elected president, Jorge Ubico Castañeda.

Spínola had become a collaborator with the newspaper La Noticia and the magazine El Gráfico de Guatemala and life fell into a productive pattern with her writing several hours every day.

[16] The pieces Spínola included in the volume were laments of love lost, physical longing and have hints that she may have been criticizing the government in the only way possible in the highly censored climate.

[15] With the student revolts, overturn of the Ubico dictatorship and elections of 1944, Spínola's writing took on a more confrontational tone and she openly began to criticize the government and speak of feminism.

[19] In 1946, the government authorized a printing of 1,500 copies of a poetry collection called "Alondra", but though she needed the money, Spínola did not follow through as she was unsatisfied with the quality of the poems.

In April, Lilian died from leukemia and those who knew her said it was the first time grief seemed to defeat Spínola who had lost her parents, husband, three other children, her lover and now her daughter.

[26] That same year she received the Gold Medal Francisco Méndez for her contributions to national literature, but she was too grief-stricken to stay in Guatemala and fled back to Chile and her son, Rafael.

[28] In 1981, Horacio Figueroa Marroquín, published a book called Las nueve musas del parnaso guatemalense, in which he named Spínola one of the nine muses of Guatemala.