This article compares the novel Dolores by the colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) with the prevailing legal standard for the time when the text was written. The aim is to encompass legal writing with the fictional to determine that both reflect the social reality and, in the case of the author, that her writings suggest changing the structures that privileged civilist inequality of women and their exclusion from public life. In this sense, affect the protagonist of the novel with the disease of leprosy is a powerful literary strategy to question the only possible role for women: motherhood and marriage. Additionally, the fact of allowing the protagonist express her most intimate reflections allow us to deduce the veiled intention to encourage hers readers to break the traditional schemes to find alternative intelectual life in the legal and french literary model.