This extraordinary novel, written between 1900 and 1902 and never before translated into Spanish, evokes a life so rich in turbulence that it places "the fate of every bourgeois woman in the hands of deadly boredom," as the German critics once said. It tells the relentless struggle for self-determination of the young noblewoman Ellen Olestjerne, for whom freedom is life’s first principle — in love, in sex, in work, and in motherhood. Neither boarding schools, nor family discipline, nor numerous lovers are, in her view, reasons to restrain that fundamental freedom. Family and bohemia: a life and an era as seductive as they are complex.