Aurora Caceres

Topics: Peruvian essayists, Peruvian feminists, Peruvian novelists

Zoila Aurora Caceres (1877-1958) was a writer associated with the literary movement known as modernismo. This European-based daughter of a Peruvian president wrote novels, essays, travel literature and a biography of her husband, the Guatemalan novelist Enrique Gomez Carrillo.

During the War of the Pacific, her sister was killed while her family was fleeing from the Chileans. Her father Andres Avelino Caceres, at that time a Colonel in the Peruvian Army, was mounting a guerilla war against the occupying army. Peru (and Bolivia) lost that war and the Chileans occupied Lima, the country's capital. After the Chileans departed, now General Caceres served in a variety of functions, as a diplomat in Europe, president of the Republic, and then exiled after a bloody coup in 1895. All of these events had an impact on Zoila Aurora Caceres, who was educated by nuns in Germany and at the Sorbone in Paris. She was known to many of the major modernista authors including Amado Nervo, Ruben Dario and Enrique Gomez Carrillo, whom she married.

Caceres, Zoila Aurora. Mujeres de ayer y de hoy. Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1910.