Eleodora (1887) and Las consecuencias (1889) conform a singular example within Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera's (1842- 1909) literary production, Though the usual critique tend to consider both as the same novel, because they share the same plot, there are manifold reasons to differentiate them, including their respective placements in different stages of the author's production. The former stands closer to the romantic drama, whilst the latter shows the marked naturalistic influence of the author's latest novels. Eleodora and Las consecuencias may be regarded as a rewriting process, thus revealing the strategies used for constructing the new aesthetics: title change, new ending, the complexities of supporting characters, the scientific terms, the descriptions, etc. At her release Eleodora benefitted from Ricardo Palma's support: it is him who endorsed and published it in the Ateneo de Lima. Cabello had based the plot on his A Mother's Love tradition, and had dedicated him the novel. Las consecuencias, much more voluminous, abandons this elite attitude as it appears serialized in several issues of La Nacion and as a book, that same year, but is received with negative criticism, very similar to the reaction arisen by Blanca Sol. Two years span between these two novels of so diverse aesthetics, a fact that be interpreted as revealing the tension about what a woman should and should not write, the struggle between canon and transgression. By taking this stance Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera opted for the harsh path. This edition by Monica Cardenas has a special interest for the Latin American Feminist Literature critique. It allows reading under all the scientific criteria two novels by Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, unpublished since 1889. Peruvian Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera was an exceptional writer, whose fame equaled to Juana Manuela Gorriti's and Emilia Pardo Bazan's. Monica Cardenas has recovered Eleodora, the first version of Las consecuencias, and shows how the aesthetics of sublime alternates with the grotesque, an inheritance from the romantic period. The Cabellos' human types show the turn of the Century ideology. As the editor puts it: "Mercedes Cabellos' novels are a showcase of the traps surrounding the Lima society women of the nineteenth century ...] the novel shows a contradictory modernity." Thanks to this research, with which Monica Cardenas completes her doctoral thesis in France, it becomes possible to make a genetic critique of the rewriting techniques and the narrative strategies used by Cabello de Carbonera in the passage from one novel to the other. Isabelle Tauzin-Castellanos.

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 narrative. Her tragic destiny is sealed with a marriage of convenience at an early age. She discovers true love, but also deception, selfishness and the basest of instincts among those who surround her. After almost 125 years of neglect, we offer this edition of the first novel By Cabello de Carbonera, as an indispensable text for Latin American and gender studies scholars and students to explore the complex relationship the author held with the realist and naturalist movements of the nineteenth-century. There has been much uncertainty about its date of publication. It was first published in Lima in the newspaper, La Nacion, (1887), and later on that same year, in book form, by the Imprenta de Torres Aguirre. Ismael Pinto Vargas, her most recent and thorough biographer, concluded in 2003 that the novel had been published in Paris by the journal, El Correo de Ultramar, surely before the publication's demise in early 1886. His conjectures are supported by none other than the author herself in her dedication of her novel, Sacrificio y recompensa (1886) to her friend and mentor, the Argentinean writer, Juana Manuela Gorriti. This edition confirms his findings, and echoes the renewed interest in the works of Cabello de Carbonera as pioneer of the realist and naturalist novel in Latin America.

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 Sacrificio y recompensa, Elisa, the beautiful putative daughter of Estela's tutor, that can be regarded as the immediate precedent of Blanca Sol: "Elisa was a Limea very Limea, though to honor truth, she had all the defects, without the great virtues of the women born in these fortunate places."and."she was no more than a lively girl, with an active imagination, clear inteligence and a precocious and unbriddled ambition, purely feminine ambition, to flaunt, ascend, get noticed and grow above her humble condition." The tale of the intertwined destinies of Alvaro Gonzlez, Estela Guzmn and Catalina Montiel, depicted through the pen of the "novelist who] must regard and extoll as unique means to bring unto the reader's conscience the most useful and benefitial lesson proposed by the realistic school" may, under the scope of the following works of Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, be regarded as the first attempt to shed light upon the feminine condition in Lima at those times. "lacking other options they use matrimony to ascend in the social pyramid." Faithful to her ensuing writings on theory such as La novela moderna (1892), the author achieves in this work what she says in the foreword: "stay appart from realism, as understood by today's fashionable school, and search for the real in the beauty of feelings, copying the movements of the soul, not when it becomes vile and degraded, but when it elevates and becomes noble." Sacrificio y recompensa is, thus, the best introduction to Blanca Sol and her author.

A bestseller in its time with four published editions, Blanca Sol (1889) was a highly controversial novel when it first appeared. Thought by many to be a roman a clef about a well-known woman of Lima's high society, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (1842-1909) distanced herself from this criticism by making substantial changes for the second edition and by including a prologue stating her intentions of writing a realist novel, a social novel, inspired in reality, but not a copy. With a well earned reputation as an outspoken feminist writer and contributor to cultural journals in Peru and abroad with essays such as -La influencia de la mujer en la civilizacion- and -Necesidad de una industria para la mujer-, Mercedes Cabello explores in Blanca Sol the consequences of social climbing, adulation, vanity, and excessive narcissistic infatuation, while also criticizing loveless marriage. The eponymous protagonist wryly declares in this regard, -marriage without love was nothing but prostitution accepted by society-. The novel tells the story of Blanca Sol's move to social heights, and then her descent into prostitution. Blanca marries a wealthy simpleton to save her family from their lost fortune and maintain her social position. While she lives the life of a socialite, her husband goes into bankruptcy as a result of Blanca's lifestyle. Faced with penury, six children to support, and a husband confined in an insane asylum due to the combined effect of financial insolvency and marital failure, Blanca Sol follows what she thinks is the only road to maintain her past lifestyle: prostitution. Defiant up to the very end, she seeks to take revenge despising society -and scoffing at virtue and morality-. Blanca Sol presents many of the themes Mercedes Cabello writes in her essays: pretense, excessive materialism, marriage for convenience, and women's education. The novel combines melodrama and realistic techniques to portrait the vices of Blanca Sol and examine a society that, in the eyes of the author, values gold above all. As Mazquiaran de Rodriguez points out, many critics consider Blanca Sol to be -the first naturalistic attempt at a novel to appear in Peru-. Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera is also the author of the novels Sacrificio y recompensa (1886); Los amores de Hortensia (Una historia contemporanea) (1887); Eleodora (1887); Las consecuencias (1889); El conspirador (1892). Additionally, she published the following essays in book form: La novela moderna. Estudio filosofico (1892); La Religion de la Humanidad. Carta al senor D. Juan Enrique Lagarrigue (1893); El conde Leon Tolstoy (1894). This new critical edition of Mercedes Cabello's novel -fully annotated, conveniently priced, and easily available in the U.S.- is suited for courses on 19th century Latin American literature, women studies that focus on Latin America, Latin American Studies, and literature and cultural surveys on Latin America.