Miguel Ángel De Marco, Manuelita (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2023), 320 pp.

Abstract

This work adds to the many biographies that the author has published, several of them focused on the 19th century, although this is the first focused on a woman. In the Prologue, he acknowledges that the idea of dealing with the life of Rosas's daughter had been around him for many years, from the time when, through journalistic notes, he made sketches of actors from our past. His books Soldados y Poetas and De los hombres, la patria y el coraje ‒which has gone through several editions and, in each one, new characters, some of them little known‒ are related to those portraits and more than one of their loopholes sneaks into this book. I cite without going into detail the one referring to Florencio Varela (p. 237), the one entitled "He who is not entirely with us is against us" (p. 102) or the one that refers to the sailors of the frigate Eugenia and the brig Lagerbjelke (p. 263). But it is in the two biographies that precede this one ‒Quiroga, federal leader, indomitable warrior and Brown, first admiral of the Argentines‒ where the figure of Manuela de Rosas begins to gain volume. De Marco has a deep knowledge of the time in which his biographies are inserted, which provides each of them with a solid scaffolding on which to anchor themselves.