Adela Zamudio is Bolivia's most widely acclaimed female intellectual and a founding figure of its feminist movement. She dedicated herself to writing and teaching and vigorously defended the causes of the Bolivian Liberal Party in public forums. In addition to essays, she wrote a novel, short stories, light dramatic works, and poetry. She is arguably the country's best-known poet, both the pinnacle of its belated Romanticism and, in a personal way, a bearer of some of the changes that transformed the literary field around 1900.

Adela Zamudio was born 11 October 1854 in Cochabamba, where she later settled after living in the small towns of Corocoro, Corani, and Viloma. Her father, Adolfo Zamudio, was an Argentinean émigré and engineer, and her mother, Modesta Ribero, a member of a wealthy mining family from La Paz. The country was undergoing a series of political upheavals, often marked by violent changes in...