‘Con el ropaje de la novela’

Abstract

This article examines a text by the nineteenth-century Peruvian writer Margarita Praxedes Munoz to explore how she plays with the boundaries of the emerging form of the novel to bring together scientific knowledge and experiences that do not fit normative social models of womanhood. Through an analysis of the text as autobiographical fiction and its portrayal of the figure of the angel del hogar (angel of the house), this article argues that we need to find new ways of reading this type of text that consider how the conditions of production both create and limit the spaces that nineteenth-century women writers have for expressing their lived realities.