Born in northern Argentina, Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818–92) accompanied her family into political exile in Bolivia, where at age fifteen she married Manuel Isidoro Belzu, then an army captain, with whom she went on to bear three children. Belzu left her nine years later, amid mutual accusations of infidelity. He became Bolivia’s head of state in 1848. Gorriti took their children to Lima, where she embarked on her journalistic and literary career and became the hostess of a prominent intellectual salon and an advocate for the progress of women. Toward the end of her life, she resettled in Argentina, where...