This article analyses the illustrated volume of the novel entitled Una holandesa en America (A Dutchwoman in America), a volume made by its author in the form of what we could call a bricolage novel. It deals with the author’s work in the workshop where she wrote and edited, clipping her novel out of the newspaper where it first appeared (1876) and designing the pages of a volume illustrated mainly by prints taken form English and French newspapers form the 1860s and 1870s. My analysis shows that the composition of this volume is not a simple act of illustration of previous verbal contents: in fact, Soledad Acosta builds a visual narrative in which she revisits European iconographic constructions of women and of America. The novel was published as a book in 1888 in Curacao, a final version that this article also explores.