This study explores the intertextuality between Aurora Caceres's "La rosa muerta" (1914) and the novel "Del amor, del dolor y del vicio" (1898) by her ex-husband, Enrique Gomez Carrillo. Caceres strategically mentions Gomez Carrillo's novel in "La rosa muerta" to invite a reading of her work in dialogue with his. Both narratives follow the sexual awakening of an independently wealthy young widow, but exhibit important differences. Gomez Carrillo's sexually transgressive character closely follows the aesthetic and discursive norms of "fin de siecle" literature that pathologized female desire. His fictional women are a literary and aesthetic experiment in female decadentism, one that he ultimately puts aside by marrying the characters by the end of the novel. Caceres's narrative revises Gomez Carrillo's representations of female sexuality and "modernista" representations of women more broadly. I analyze Caceres's writing of the female body, illness, and desire to demonstrate the ways in which Caceres simultaneously critiques misogynistic discourses of the turn of the century and presents positive and realistic images of women's sexuality for future generations of women. "La rosa muerta" is a "modernista" novel that anticipates the emboldened attitude toward female eroticism and the provocative writing style of women writers of the avant-garde and the boom. (Contains 19 notes.)